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KNIGHT LETTER

The Lewis Carroll Society of North America

Fall 201 7 Volume II Issue 29 Number 99

The Knight Letter is the official magazine of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America,
a literary society whose purpose is to encourage study and appreciation of the life, work,
times, and influence of Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), and is in affiliation
with the Fales Library, New York University.

It is published twice a year and is distributed free to all members.

Editorial correspondence should be sent to
the Editor in Chief at morgan@bookgenius.org.

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions for The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch should be sent to
morgan@bookgenius.org.

Submissions and suggestions for Serendipidity and Sic , Sic, Sic should be sent to

andrewogus@gmail.com.

Submissions and suggestions for All Must Have Prizes should be sent to
matt.crandall@gmail.com.

Submissions and suggestions for From Our Far-Flung Correspondents should be sent to

farflungknigh t@ gmail. com.

ISSN 0193-886X

Chris Morgan, Editor in Chief
Cindy Watter, Editor, Of Books and Things
Mark Burstein, Editor, From Our Far-Flung Correspondents
Foxxe Editorial Services, Copyeditor
Mark Burstein, Production Editor
Sarah Adams-Kiddy, Proofreader
Andrew H. Ogus, Designer

THE LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA

President:

Stephanie Lovett, president@lewiscarroll.org
Vice-President:

Linda Cassady, linda.cassady@gmail.com
Secretary:

Sandra Lee Parker, secretary@lewiscarroll.org
www.LewisCarroll.org

Annual membership dues are U.S.. $35 (regular),

$50 (international), and $100 (sustaining).

Subscriptions, correspondence, and inquiries should be addressed to:

Sandra Lee Parker, LCSNA Secretary
PO Box 197

Annandale, Virginia 22003

On the cover: Byron Sewell, Teenage Alice Playing Croquet

CONTENTS

TH6 R6CTORY UMBR6LLA

_ m _

Delaware and Dodgson ,

or, Wonderlands: Egad! Ado! 1

CHRIS MORGAN

Drawing the Looking-Glass Country 11

DMITRY YERMOLOVICH

Is snark Part of a Cyrillic Doublet ? 16

VICTOR FET & MICHAEL EVERSON

USC Libraries ’ 13 th Wonderland Award 18

LINDA CASSADY

A “New ” Lewis Carroll Puzzle 19

CLARE IMHOLTZ

Two Laments: One for Logic

& One for the King 20

AUGUSTA. IMHOLTZ, JR

MISCHMASCH

- m -

Leaves from the Deanery Garden —

Serendipity — Sic, Sic, Sic 21

Ravings from the Writing Desk 25

STEPHANIE LOVETT

All Must Have Prizes 2 6

MATT CRANDALL

Arcane Illustrators: Goranka Vrus Murti 29

MARK BURSTEIN

Nose Is a Nose Is a Nose 30

GOETZ KLUGE

In Memoriam: Morton Cohen 32

EDWARD GUILIANO

CARROLLIAN NOT0S

-K

More on Morton

Alice in Puzzleland:

The Jabberwocky Puzzle Project

CHRIS MORGAN

OF BOOKS AND THINGS
- 0 -

Contemporary Review of

Nabokov ’5 Anya Discovered 3 6

VICTOR FET

The Albanian Gheg Wonderland 36

BYRON SEWELL

Alice and the Graceful White Rabbit 37

ROBERT STEK

Alice’s Adventures in Punch 38

ANDREW OGUS

Alice’s Adventures under

the Land of Enchantment 39

CINDY WATTER

Alice D. 40

CINDY WATTER

Mad Hatters and March Hares 41

ROSE OWENS

AW, ill. Charles Santore 41

ANDREW OGUS

Rare, Uncollected, & Unpublished

Verse of Lewis Carroll 42

EDWARD WAKELING

The Alice Books and the Contested

Ground of the Natural World 42

HAYLEY RUSHING

Evergreen 43

FROM OUR FAR-FLUNG
CORR0SPOND0NTS

Art & Illustration—Articles & Academia —

Books — Events, Exhibits, & Places—Internet &
Technology—Movies & Television — Music —
Performing Arts—Things 44

-&gm

I n this issue, we offer a mini-theme on puzzles—
a favorite pastime of Lewis Carroll’s (and mine,
too, I may add). The word puzzle appears once in
the Alice books, in the “Wool and Water” chapter of
Through the Looking-Glass :

‘Things flow about so here!’ [Alice] said . . .
after she had spent a minute or so in vainly
pursuing a large bright thing, that looked
sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a
work-box, and was always in the shelf next
above the one she was looking at. . . .‘I’ll
follow it up to the very top shelf of all. It’ll
puzzle it to go through the ceiling, I expect! ’

Another puzzle—the mysterious one-sided Mobius
strip—is mentioned in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded :

‘You have seen the puzzle of the Paper Ring?’
Mein Herr said, addressing the Earl. ‘Where you
take a slip of paper, and join its ends together,
first twisting one, so as to join the upper corner
of one end to the lower corner of the other?’

The “puzzle” is to figure out how a one-sided strip of
paper can exist in a three-dimensional world. Puzzle
collectors call such apparent paradoxes “impossible
objects.” You might ask, “Is a Mobius strip really one¬
sided?” It sounds impossible, but as we know, many
impossible things can be believed before breakfast.

Carroll loved word puzzles, as well as mechanical
puzzles, which he often showed to his child friends.
I report here on a new set of mechanical puzzles
unveiled at the annual International Puzzle Party

last summer in Paris—more than a Baker’s dozen of
puzzles, in fact. They’re based on themes from the
Alice books, and I got a chance to try to solve them.
The set includes such puzzles as “The Cheshire Cat”
and “Down the Rabbit Hole.” I’m sure Carroll would
have delighted in this tribute to him from some of
today’s greatest puzzle designers. Each of the limited-
edition puzzle sets is contained in a large Victorian-
style chest, itself a daunting puzzle. These editions are
likely to sell at auction in the five figures.

Carroll also liked anagrams, and they appear of¬
ten in his writing. Clare Imholtz unveils some newly
discovered anagram challenges from Carroll. We
hope readers will enjoy trying to solve them. We also
feature an anagram in the title of our meeting report,
“Delaware and Dodgson,” which, as it turns out, is fod¬
der for anagrammatists. (Incidentally, an anagram for
“Sylvie and Bruno” is “Valorised Bunny,” clearly a
hidden reference to the White Rabbit. But I digress.)

Victor Fet and Michael Everson discuss the pos¬
sibility that the word “Snark” could be part of a Cyril¬
lic Doublet. Carroll invented the game of Doublets
in 1879 and conducted a regular column about them
in Vanity Fair magazine. Doublets are better known
today as “Word Ladders,” in which you’re given two
words of the same length and asked to link them to¬
gether with a series of intermediate words, each dif¬
fering from the last by one letter. For example, one
solution to the challenge “Head—Tail” is “Head,

HEAL, TEAL, TELL, TALL, TAIL.”

We hope you’ll enjoy our venture into the Carrol-
lian world of puzzles.

CHRIS MORGAN

TH0 R0CTORY UMBR6LLA

?>szlawar£ and Hodgson,
or. Wonderlands: 0gad! fldo!

CHRIS MORGAN

D elaware met Dodgson this past October, at
our fall meeting in Newark, Delaware, at
the University of Delaware—and given Mr.
Carroll’s fondness for puzzles, we have included an
anagram in our title. (We rejected Garlanded Dodo
Wanes as possibly leading to Addled Wordages
Anon.)

The weekend began for several LCSNA mem¬
bers on Friday the 27th, when we converged on New¬
ark Charter School for the twentieth anniversary Max¬
ine Schaefer Reading. We were welcomed by librarian
Maria Bolan, and organized ourselves for a special
event. As always, we read/performed the Mad Tea-
Party chapter, using a script written by Griffin Miller,
who performed Alice and the Dormouse. April Lynn
James took the role of the Hatter, Stephanie Lovett
read the March Hare, and Ellie Schaefer-Salins nar¬
rated. In celebration of this landmark, though, we
didn’t entertain our usual audience of 40 to 60 chil¬
dren—instead, we performed for 200 third graders!
The students, who have Alice in Wonderland in their
curriculum, asked us all kinds of questions, and were
especially impressed with April’s outstanding Hat¬
ter outfit (and critical of the rest of us for not living
up to this standard). The event concluded with each
student, and the school, being given a nice hardback
copy of Alice, and our group left, very much pleased
to have carried on the legacy of Maxine Schaefer.

At the meeting the next day, David Schaefer
spoke about the twenty years of Maxine Schaefer read¬
ings. He noted that Maxine always felt that the LCSNA
didn’t pay enough attention to children. When she
died, the family felt the best way to honor her memory
was indeed to honor children. “We came up with the
reading idea, and that’s how it all started.” He shared
a photograph of a whimsical thank-you letter from a
student who had attended one of the readings (p. 10).

Our first speaker of the morning was Dr. Dana
Richards, associate professor of computer science at
George Mason University in northern Virginia, on the
topic “Martin Gardner: Behind the Looking-Glass.”
For decades Dr. Richards has been working on a bi¬
ography of Martin Gardner, whom he knew well, and
a bibliography of Gardner’s massive and wide-ranging
work in science, mathematics, logic, magic, theology,
pseudo-science, and literary criticism—particularly
his work on G. K. Chesterton, Lord Dunsany, L. Frank
Baum, and many other authors, including, of course,
Lewis Carroll. His lively lecture, delivered with Power¬
Point slides in the background as he moved back and
forth in the open area between the audience and the
lectern, wove in and out of Martin’s intellectual life
and works.

Born in 1914, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his fa¬
ther was a successful petroleum geologist, Gardner
attended the highly regarded Central Tulsa High

School. From an early age, he was interested in me¬
chanical puzzles, which he collected seriously from
1928 to 1940, and The Wizard of Oz, not Alicel As a
teenager, in 1926, he was interviewed by a Tulsa news¬
paper reporter and said he didn’t think Lewis Carroll
was suitable for children. (Little could he then have
known he would spend much of his life in making
Carroll understandable not only to children but to
adults as well.) In 1936 he graduated from the Univer¬
sity of Chicago, where he had majored in philosophy.

After working at odd jobs, he served in the Navy
in World War II, and afterwards returned to the Uni¬
versity of Chicago for one year of graduate school to
study theology—not math or science. He moved to
New York, where he did freelance writing and became
a regular contributor to, and the editor of, Humpty
Dumpty children’s magazine in the early 1950s. In
1955, during a lunch with then Doubleday editor
Clarkson N. Potter, Martin mentioned the idea of
an annotated version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books;
Doubleday demurred.

Three years later, Potter had moved to The Dial
Press, and in 1958 he persuaded Dial—over the
skepticism of their president, George Joel—to sign
a contract with Martin for what was to become (but
not straightaway) The Annotated Alice. Clarkson Potter
left Dial to found his own firm under his own name
and purchased The Annotated Alice contract from Dial
for $500; he clearly had confidence in the idea, and
rightly so, as it turned out. Martin suggested that the
philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell
write the annotations. Russell refused, so the task fell
to Martin, who at first wanted to include The Hunting
of the Snark together with the Alice books. (That work,
his Annotated Snark , did not appear until 1962, from
another publisher, and Richards pointed out that the
charming verses on the back of the 1967 Penguin pa¬
perback edition, beginning “The inscrutable Snark /
leaves us all in the dark” were not written by Gard¬
ner, though they are good enough to be his.) Potter
himself disliked footnotes, so he turned to artist and
book designer Sydney Butchkes (1920-2015), who de¬
signed the marginal glosses, which were a significant
contribution to the popularity of The Annotated Alice ,
first published in 1960. (The book was originally on
laid, as opposed to wove paper, which increased the
cost from $8 to $10.) It is a work, Richards pointed
out, that is probably burned onto our retinas.

Noted Carroll scholar Roger Lancelyn Green
reviewed the first British edition four years later.
The book has sold over a million copies in eight lan¬
guages. The marginal glosses—the annotations—are
successful because they complement our natural eye
movements in a way footnotes, not to mention end-
notes, do not. It became a practice imitated by doz¬
ens of subsequent books, the titles of which regularly

begin The Annotated _. Almost all books that were

annotated before 1960, pre-Gardner that is, were an¬
notations of the Bible or other religious texts.

Martin updated the work continually, although,
much to his distress, his royalties were reduced when
the book was sold to other publishers, even when the
“other publishers” were simply corporate subsidiar¬
ies. As Martin continued to receive suggestions and
corrections, he incorporated them in new editions:
More Annotated Alice appeared from Random House
in 1990, followed by The Annotated Alice: The Definitive
Edition from Norton in 2000. (After Martin’s death,
Mark Burstein edited The Annotated Alice: 150th An¬
niversary Deluxe Edition for Norton in 2015.)

In a letter to the poet and Carroll biographer
Florence Becker Lennon, Martin wrote that he felt
guilty seeming to appear as an expert on Lewis Car-
roll when all he did was conduct library research.

One could not talk about Martin Gardner, how¬
ever, without mentioning several of his other accom¬
plishments. Outside the world of Victorian literature,
Martin Gardner is surely known to most people as the
author of the “Mathematical Games” column in Scientif¬
ic American from 1957 to 1986. And Carroll did appear
not infrequently in those pages. The columns were col¬
lected and published in various editions to some suc¬
cess over the years. (The bibliography Dana Richards is
compiling of Martin Gardner’s publications, it should
be noted, now runs to some 350 pages.)

In 1974, Martin, together with his wife Charlotte,
Stan Marx, Morton Cohen, David and Maxine Schae¬
fer, and other Carrollian collectors and enthusiasts,
such as the young English literature scholar Edward
Guiliano, was one of the founding members of our
Society.

Dana Richards

Photo by Alan Tannenbaum

Next, the ever-effervescent Victor Fet returned
to the LCSNA to discuss “Old Russian and New Si¬
berian Wonderlands.” Victor is a biology professor at
Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. His
talk was dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of Nina
Demurova’s Russian translation of both Alice books in
1967, a major incident in literary translation. (Later,
Victor said that translations of the Alice books have
helped keep certain languages alive.) Victor classified
the books he discussed as “pre-Demurova” (Old Rus¬
sian) and “post-Demurova” (New Siberian).

The first Russian translation was Cohh e i^apcmee
duea [Sonja in a Kingdom of Wonder], appearing in
1879 ( KL 97:25, 98:16). Victor’s research has proven
that the original translator was Ekaterina Boratynska¬
ya, maiden name Timiryazeva, and not Olga Ivanovna
Timiryazeva, who was believed to be the translator for
many years, based on Warren Weaver’s quotation (in
Alice in Many Tongues ) of one of Carroll’s letters re¬
questing that Macmillan “please send a French and
a German Alice to Miss Timiriasef—care of Rev. H. S.
Thompson, English Church, St. Petersburg. She is
the lady who, I believe, is going to translate Alice into
Russian.” Victor pointed out that Boratynskaya went
on to become a professional translator of American
and English children’s books.

For many years there were only two known cop¬
ies of Sonja , but it was recreated by the LCSNA and
Evertype in 2013. Victor wrote the introduction for
the updated 2017 Evertype edition, which includes
Byron Sewell’s additions to the Tenniel illustrations.

Victor said that this version of Alice is “not just heav¬
ily Russified, but full of cultural references familiar
to the educated middle-class children of the 1870s.”
Such references were to Russian fairy-tales, Tolstoy,
Lermontov, and Pushkin, for example. Other details
of the book include the translation of “mock turtle
soup” (known as fausse tortu in Russia because French
used to be the court language) as teliachya golovka, or
“calf-head,” to follow the Tenniel illustration. Mishen-
ka-Surok (Mishenka the Marmot) replaced the Dor¬
mouse (which is a homophone of the Russian name
Sonja). The price tag of the Hatter’s hat was changed
to 50 kopecks (equivalent to Carroll’s 10/6, or about
$60 today—though 10/6 was the price of a real hat,
and 50 kopecks was most likely the cleverly calculated
price of a toy hat), and Bill the Lizard becomes a cock¬
roach named Vaska.

The next translation was by Matilda Granstrom
in 1908. Alice becomes Anya here; most puns and
nonsense are removed; “an interesting approach to
Lewis Carroll,” Victor said dryly. The poems were re¬
placed by non-parodies. The mouse’s “dry” lecture
was replaced by “The War between Mice and Frogs,”
a famous ancient Greek parody of The Iliad. This was
published in a luxury edition (Granstrom and her
husband had a successful business publishing such
books).

In 1909, two more translations appeared. The
first, by Alexandra Rozhdestvenskaya, appeared in a
children’s journal called Zadushevnoe slovo [A Heart¬
felt Word]. This weekly publication introduced chil¬
dren to authors such as Mark Twain, Louisa May Al-
cott, Beatrix Potter, Jules Verne, Carlo Collodi, and so
forth. Rozhdestvenskaya also translated Hans Brinker,
Little Men , and other bestsellers for children. “Al¬
legro” (pen name of Poliksena Solovyova), who was
responsible for the other translation of 1909, was not
a professional translator; she was a symbolist poet.
According to Victor, she ran a “wonderful” biweekly
children’s journal whose audience was the children of
St. Petersburg’s literary and artistic elite. Her knowl¬
edge of English was not great (an odd quality in a
translator), but her puns were inventive. “Father Wil¬
liam” was replaced by a poem describing a war of the
mushrooms, a parody of Pushkin’s “Poltava.” Peter
the Great appears as a fat boletus (mushroom)!

Victor explained a couple of terms to us. The
“replacement” (also called “domestication”) of puns,
parodies, and poems with other wordplay that would
be more familiar to a non-English-speaking reader

A very happy Victor Fet holds an unexpected dis¬
covery from the books for sale by Matt and Wendy
Crandall at the meeting: a Russian edition of
Alice he had as a child but had not seen since!

was a feature of many Russian translations. The “aca¬
demic” approach was to translate the parody poetry
“very, very closely,” and print them next to the origi¬
nals of Isaac Watts and the rest. Carroll preferred
“domestication,” and said so, in a note in the 1869
German edition, according to Warren Weaver. Some
words, however, need no translation. Victor said that
“Snark” is a “nice Russian sound. . . ‘Boojum’ doesn’t
sound well, but it shouldn’t.”

A 1913 edition was very likely written by Mikhail
Chekhov, the younger brother of Anton. It was
abridged and “enhanced,” and titled Alice in a Magic
Country. Victor said that Chekhov put in “interesting
and strange passages.”

In 1923, V. Sirin (pseudonym of Vladimir Nabo¬
kov) published Anya in Wonderland, in Berlin. The dis¬
tinctively antic artwork was done by Sergei Zalshupin.
Recently a very negative review of this book (written
in 1924) was unearthed in Prague (page 36).

Victor’s least favorite translator (“I hate him”),
D’Aktil (pen name of Anatoly Frenkel), also pub¬
lished an edition of Alice in 1923. The translation is
quite good, but the translator was a notorious propa¬
gandist for Lenin and Stalin. He wrote a cheery ditty
known as “The March of Budyonny’s Cavalry.” (One
of the White Russian refugees pushed by that cavalry
from the Crimea to Europe was the young Vladimir
Nabokov.) Frenkel’s name is infamous as “a reminder
to writers who use their talents to serve those who kill
and enslave.”

Russians have a tradition of translating Eng¬
lish nonsense. Samuil Marshak translated “Humpty
Dumpty,” “Father William,” and “The Lobster Qua¬
drille” (Nina Demurova used them). He also trans¬
lated every one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and most of
Robert Burns—as well as “the best children’s poetry.”
Victor said that every Russian child knew Marshak’s
poems. Appropriately, given Humpty’s interest in lan¬
guage, Marshak translated HD’s name into “Shaltay-
Boltay,” which means “babble, empty talk.” The name
is possibly borrowed from a Turkic-influenced Rus¬
sian dialect. Marshak tried to translate Wonderland,
and got as far as Chapter 1. Victor showed us a photo¬
graph of the manuscript, which had been sent to him
by Marshak’s grandson.

There is a largely forgotten translation of Look¬
ing-Glass, which was translated by Vladimir Azov into
Mirror-Land (1924). Victor called it a “poetic, potent
toponym for Carroll’s unnamed chess-world coun¬
try.” After 1940, more editions of Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland appeared. Victor showed us a picture of a
1958 edition that was the version he first read.

Alice is a highly dialogic text, with heteroglos-
sia and polyphony (terms of Russian language theo¬
rist Mikhail Bakhtin), presenting challenges for the
translator. The text is “frozen,” but target languages

for translation are constantly evolving. The characters
are exploring the limits of “identity, memory, knowl¬
edge, power, social and gender conventions, and lan¬
guage itself.”

Victor next discussed the “New Siberian Wonder¬
lands.” Thanks to publisher Evertype, and inspired
by Alice 150, he recruited a group of translators, lin¬
guists, and authors, and is producing a series of Alice
books in languages indigenous to the more remote
areas of Russia and ex-USSR. Victor wrote a set of
guidelines for translating poetry, names, puns, and
the like, and in 2016-17, Evertype published Alice in
Kyrgyz, Shor, Altai, Bashkir, and Khakas, with Komi-
Zyrian and Yakut to come.

Relatively few people speak these languages.
For example, the Shor are a small indigenous ethnic
group from southern Siberia, in Russia. They number
fewer than 13,000. Their language is from the Uigur-
Oguz group of Turkic languages. The translator is Dr.
Liubov Arbacakova, who “domesticated” the text to
make young readers more familiar with their history.
For example, Alice says of the Mouse, “I daresay it’s a
Russian [mouse] come over with the missionary Ver¬
bitsky ...” (who also happened to be an encourager
of Shor literacy and literature). Victor added that
some words that were nonexistent in Shor were taken
from other languages, but other wordplay (such as
pig/fig) was manageable.

To conclude, Victor told us the lessons learned
in translation:

1. Alice helps to promote and support rare languag¬
es.

2. For some, it is the first translated English book
they will read.

3. It is very rewarding and appreciated by the na¬
tive linguists, writers, and poets.

4. Advisory editing and consulting are necessary.

5. “Domestication” of puns and poetry is often
accepted, but might be rejected in favor of an
“academic” approach.

6. A print-on-demand book is hardly available to
local readers and/or school libraries in poor
countries.

Victor closed with an appreciation “above all, to Nina
Demurova, who brought Lewis Carroll to my genera¬
tion in Russia.”

There was a delightful coda to Victor’s talk. Dur¬
ing a break, when people were selling/trading Alice-
related items, what should Victor find but the 1958
Russian translation by Alexander Olenich-Gnenenko,
his long-lost childhood book! He was thrilled.

Next, Edna Runnels Ranck, EdD, who is an early
childhood care and education advocate and histo¬
rian, gave a talk entitled “Glorious Nonsense: Not
Only Lewis Carroll but Also Gertrude Stein.” She ex-

plored the nature of nonsense in children’s literature
by comparing the two Alice books to Gertrude Stein’s
two children’s books, The World Is Round and To Do: A
Book of Alphabets and Birthdays. Stein lived from 1874
to 1946, so she was alive during the latter part of Car-
roll’s lifetime. It’s an unusual, intriguing comparison
of authors, perhaps, but Ranck notes that “Carroll
and Stein lived with a constant focus on language, its
development and its use to communicate, to inform,
educate, and entertain.” Both played with language.
And all of their children’s books employed nonsense
content, phrasing, and words.

Lewis Carroll is considered by most to be a mas¬
ter—if not the master—of “glorious nonsense” in chil¬
dren’s literature. One of eleven children and friend to
numerous children throughout his life, Carroll knew
his young audience well. He notably entertained his
younger brothers and sisters with stories, jokes, puns,
limericks, constructed toys, newsletters, and puppets.
Also, Lewis Carroll’s muse, Ranck reminds us, was a
child. Carroll may have used nonsense to achieve to¬
tal order, as Michael Holquist posits in his 1969 Yale
French Studies article “What Is a Boojum? Nonsense
and Modernism” (he suggests that the abstract nature
of nonsense gives the creator total control over the
“rules”). Or perhaps Carroll wanted to provide a chal¬
lenging “wider world” to his young readers, or simply
to arouse children’s curiosity. Whatever the reason,
the nonsense is indispensable . . . and glorious, both
playful and sometimes unsettling. However, as Fran-
cine Prose notes in The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women
and the Artists They Inspired , Carroll had a fondness for
mischief, nonsense, and invention—he was a “grown¬
up who knew how to play.”

While it might be said that Carroll became an
author of children’s literature through unplanned
success, Stein was formally invited. In 1939, Marga¬
ret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon and other
children’s books, suggested to publisher William R.
Scott that some well-known authors, including Ernest
Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Gertrude Stein, be
invited to write a children’s story. Hemingway and
Steinbeck declined; Stein accepted. She surprised
them, at once, with a near-complete children’s manu¬
script, The World Is Round. At Stein’s request, despite
additional publishing expense, the book was printed
on rose-colored paper in blue ink. The illustrations
were done by Clement Hurd, who had illustrated
Brown’s Goodnight Moon.

The sound and rhythm of the language in Stein’s
two children’s books are playful and “musical”; the two
are best read aloud. The heroine, Rose, of The World
Is Round , recites one of Stein’s most famous quotes,
“Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose” as she ponders if
she would still be Rose if she were not named Rose.
Many of Stein’s phrases in the books are repetitive,

and most have no punctuation marks, in accordance
with her famous stream-of-consciousness style, which
many concur originated with the work of psychologist
William James (brother of novelist Henry). The style
emulates the passage of thought through one’s mind.
Sentences typically are longer, less organized, and
more sporadic. Stein was undoubtedly influenced by
William James’s work when she studied medicine un¬
der him at Harvard for three years.

Ranck noted that, “in reading many of Stein’s
writings aloud, it becomes clear how a sentence
should be read only as you read it, most likely twice—
or more times.” For example, Rose decides to carve
her name into the trunk of a tree:

So she took out her pen-knife, she did not
have a glass pen she did not have a feather
from a hen she did not have any ink she had
nothing pink, she would just stand on her
chair and around and around even if there
was a very little sound she would carve on
the tree Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose
is a Rose until it went all the way round.

Stein’s second children’s book, To Do: A Book of Alpha¬
bets and Birthdays , was rejected in her lifetime by Scott
Publishers as being too long, and inappropriate for
children. It was published posthumously, without illus¬
trations, along with some of Stein’s other unpublished
work, by Yale University Press in 1957. In 2011, it was
again published by Yale University Press in association
with the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library,
this time with color illustrations by Giselle Potter.

August Imholtz, Jr., next gave a talk about perhaps
the only person in the history of the Under Ground
original manuscript about whom most of us know
very little. He began his illustrated lecture, titled “His
Master’s Voice and Alice,” with a projected photo of
a rather stolid looking child—Eldridge Johnson, na-

tive son of Delaware, who invented the Victor Talking
Machine, the source of the wealth that allowed him
to purchase Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in 1928.

The genesis of the book was, of course, the fate¬
ful boat trip on July 4, 1862, but it was more than two
years later that Carroll gave her the manuscript as a
holiday present. (He had had difficulties with his il¬
lustrations.) Carroll received very positive informal
reviews of the story—George MacDonald’s son said
“There ought to be sixty thousand volumes of it.” (Au¬
gust added, “What market researchers worth their salt
would ignore such a six-year-old’s opinion!”) Carroll
decided to find a commercial publisher for his tale.

Because John Ruskin told him that his illustra¬
tions would not do for a trade publication, Carroll
hired John Tenniel, in what became one of litera¬
ture’s most felicitous pairings of picture and text.
August showed why: The picture placement was such
that “you see what you are reading and read what you
are seeing.” On the page where Alice finally fits the
little golden key into the lock, the appropriate text
encases the illustration.

Alice Liddell grew up; she was eighteen when
Looking-Glass was published. A few years later, she
married a well-to-do landowner named Reginald Har¬
greaves, and settled in the country, where she was mis¬
tress of Cuffnells and led a life full of horses, hunting,
and house parties. She had three sons (two of whom
were killed in the Great War). After her husband died
in 1926, she had money worries, and decided to sell
the manuscript at auction. This is how it came about
that, on April 2, 1928, an American rare book dealer,
A. S. W. Rosenbach of Philadelphia, outbid everyone,
including the British Museum, for possession of Al¬
ice’s Adventures Under Ground.

Rosenbach offered to sell it to the British Muse¬
um for the price he paid, but the museum was unable

CLh

August Imholtz, Jr.

to raise the money, so he brought it back to Phila¬
delphia and sold it to Eldridge Reeves Johnson for
$150,000 (over two million dollars in today’s money).

He then told a funny story about Coolidge invit¬
ing Dr. Rosenbach to the White House for dinner.
Coolidge admired Carroll’s works, and expressed
surprise that the 1865 printing had been suppressed.
Supposedly, he said to Rosenbach, “Suppressed? I
didn’t know there was anything off-color in Alice.”
(Suppress that guinea pig!)

Eldridge Reeves Johnson was born in Wilming¬
ton, Delaware, in 1867. His parents were Asa Reeves
Johnson, a carpenter, and Caroline Johnson. Young
Eldridge apparently was not a brilliant scholar: He was
told by the headmaster of his school, Delaware Acad¬
emy, that he was not college material. Thus Eldridge
went to a machine shop in Camden, New Jersey, to
learn the trade—and ended up owning the company.

Johnson became rich by improving upon Edi¬
son’s talking machine. In 1889 one of Johnson’s as¬
sociates brought in one of Emile Berliner’s hand-
cranked gramophones and asked if Johnson could
design a spring motor for it. It took a while, but John¬
son came up with a fly-wheel governor to maintain
a constant turntable speed. He came up with other
innovations, too, such as sound box improvements,
tone arm developments, and so forth. He and his fel¬
low engineer Alfred Clark were awarded a patent for
“Sound Recording and Reproducing Devices” on Au¬
gust 7, 1900. In 1901 Johnson brought Berliner and
other business competitors together to incorporate
the Victor Talking Machine Company. Assuring them
that there was enough money in the business for all of
them, he invited them to join his company. The ones
who did became very rich—by 1905 the company’s as¬
sets reached $4,156,018 (over a hundred million to¬
day) . August showed us pictures of the Victrola (quite
impressive), the factory (very large), and Johnson’s
yacht, the Caroline (glamorous indeed). The yacht was
named after his mother, Caroline, not Lewis Carroll.
Rumor had it that he took the Under Ground manu¬
script on board with him in a special asbestos and mo¬
rocco leather box.

Johnson was one of the richest Americans of his
day, and could easily afford the manuscript. August
told us that in 1927 Johnson gave away 78% of his
income. He wrote to President Hoover in 1931, sug¬
gesting a way out of the Depression—raise wages. Au¬
gust quipped, “Clearly the kind of billionaire close to
the heart of Bernie Sanders”—although in 1932, fed
up with Roosevelt and his New Deal, Johnson enthu¬
siastically distributed copies of James M. Beck’s Our
Wonderland of Bureaucracy to America’s financial rul¬
ing class. Beck was the Solicitor General under Presi¬
dent Harding, and his book, while not a parody or

satire, used quotations from Carroll to mock the New
Deal. It appears that Johnson preferred personal phi¬
lanthropy over government programs.

Johnson loved to recite “Jabberwocky,” accord¬
ing to his son, and that may have been one reason
he wanted the manuscript. He also wanted other
people to enjoy it as much as he did, so Alice im¬
mediately went on tour. When it was exhibited at the
Library of Congress, Eldridge’s technical brain went
into gear. He wrote Herbert Putnam, the Librar¬
ian of Congress, saying he could easily construct a
page-turning device, but he was afraid of damaging
the little book. Instead, he had it photographed by
Lewin C. Handy (nephew of Matthew Brady), who
had photographed many of the important examples
of Americana in the LOC collection, including the
Declaration of Independence. August showed us im¬
ages of the negatives.

Johnson decided that the best way to preserve his
manuscript was to have a high-quality facsimile made
of it, and he chose Max Jaffe of Vienna, Austria, for
the project. Jaffe used the collotype process of print¬
ing from color photographic negatives. Since there
is no record of Johnson sending his book to Vienna,
it was probably printed from photographic negatives.
No one knows if Lewin Handy’s glass plates were
used. However, Max Jaffe printed 500 sets of sheets
of Under Ground in Vienna in 1935, and 50 of them
were bound in green leather to match the original.
They were sent to America, and Johnson distributed
them—among others, he sent one to Mrs. Coolidge,
one to Mrs. Hoover, and one to Alfred Clark’s wife,
Florence Beecher Crouse Clark of Monte Carlo.

The unbound sheets remained in Jaffe’s home
for the duration of World War II. Eldridge Johnson’s
son wrote, mistakenly, that they had been destroyed
in the war, but they had actually been shipped to
Rosenbach. Two hundred copies were bound for Mrs.
Johnson in 1952 (after her husband’s death). August
says he still needs to do some research on this, but
it appears that at least another 241 sets of the sheets
were bound in green leather, with many of them go¬
ing to Rosenbach in payment of a debt.

August showed us how the bindings varied. The
headbands (the strips of silk or cotton that are at¬
tached to the bound signatures for strengthening)
are different—gold and red in the earlier binding,
white and green in the later, and the top and bottom
right corners are round in the first fifty books, but
square in some of the later ones.

Eldridge Johnson died on November 14, 1945.
The Parke-Bernet Gallery was in charge of the auc¬
tion of his art collection and his library, including
Under Ground. Before the auction, a group of biblio¬
philes came up with a plan. Dr. Rosenbach, Lessing

Rosenwald, Arthur Houghton, and Luther Evans,
the Librarian of Congress, decided to buy the manu¬
script. and return it to the U.K. in recognition of Eng¬
land straight-arming Hitler, alone, until the United
States entered the fray. (Evans was a colorful Texan
who liked to be the center of attention. He had, un¬
successfully, tried to convince Rosenwald to build him
a house on Capitol Hill so he could entertain impor¬
tant people.) August showed us the list of donors,
which included the gentlemen above, minus Luther
Evans, as well as General “Wild Bill” Donovan, Nelson
Rockefeller, and Walt Disney, among others.

Evans led the campaign to raise the money
($50,000; equivalent to $680,000 today) for Under
Ground , and he worked on the protocol for the presen¬
tation of the manuscript. On Saturday, November 13,
1948, Evans presented the manuscript to Sir John Fos-
dyke, Director of the British Museum, and Geoffrey
Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Evans’s account
of the ceremony sounds dizzyingly euphoric:

The Archbishop made an impressive speech
of thanks about the gift as ‘an unsullied in¬
nocent act in a distracted and sinful world
... a pure act of generosity.’ Mr. George V.

Allen, Assistant Secretary of State and chief
of the U.S. delegation to the UNESCO con¬
ference, made a few kind and approving re¬
marks, a number of Americans present swelled
with pride, and a number of Britishers had
a quicker heartbeat and maybe even a slight
catch in the throat. Alice had returned!

Today the British Library has left the British Museum
and relocated to a new building in the Euston Road,
where Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is on permanent
display. August stated that Eldridge Johnson would
most certainly have approved of one brilliant new inven¬
tion—the “Turning the Page” technology on the Brit¬
ish Library’s website. This has made the original manu¬
script of Alice, in digital form, accessible to all.

In our next talk, Sarah Boxer presented a novel
approach to Alice, titled “Alice: What’s in a Name?”
Boxer is a critic and writer whose work has appeared
in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Review
of Books, Slate, and many other publications, includ¬
ing The Comics Journal and The L.A. Review of Books.
Sarah focused her presentation on Alice’s identity in
the Alice books.

Most of us would probably immediately link Alice
and identity to Alice’s “Who are You?” interaction with
the Caterpillar and its inherent search-for-self conno¬
tation. However, in Carrollian fashion, Sarah started
with Through the Looking-Glass and Alice’s encounter
with Humpty Dumpty, then worked her way backward
and eventually discussed the Caterpillar experience.

Photo by Stephanie Lovett

T T

Alice Retreats to Other Worlds

Sarah Boxer

When Humpty Dumpty says, “With a name like yours,
you might be any shape, almost,” it sets the stage for
Sarah to examine not Alice herself in terms of identity,
but a theory of identity based on “Alice,” the name.

How do you develop a “theory” of “Alice”? For
starters, Sarah asked, “What shape is Alice? What
is her purpose? Why is she so vague?” In response,
she said that Alice is a series of contradictions best
exemplified by Lewis Carroll’s Alice (curious but not
curious, childish but does not like childishness in oth¬
ers, seems pliant but isn’t), and also present in many
other real and fictional Alices, including:

Alice Liddell - the original Alice for whom
Carroll’s is named.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth - the eldest daughter of
Teddy Roosevelt. Within two days after her birth,
both her paternal grandmother and her mother
died. Her father’s resultant grief led, in no small
measure, to Alice’s turbulent childhood, which,
in turn contributed to her rebellious, indepen¬
dent ways and scandalous lifestyle. She traveled
in political circles all of her life, and was known
for her wit and humor. One of her best known
sayings was, “If you can’t say something good
about someone, come sit right here by me.”

Alice James - the lesser-known sibling of William
and Henry James. She suffered from psychologi¬
cal problems (“hysteria,” a common Victorian-era

diagnosis of women) most of her life, and is best
remembered for her diaries.

Alice Austen - a photographer whose father aban¬
doned her family before her birth. Her mother
moved in with relatives, including an uncle who
was a photographer. From him, Austen devel¬
oped an interest in photography.

Alice B. Toklas - confidante, secretary, and lover
of Gertrude Stein.

Alice Neel - an artist whose tragedies in life (the
death of an infant daughter, mental breakdown
and institutionalization, and eventual poverty)
were the basis of her work.

Alice Coltrane- a jazz musician, wife of John
Coltrane.

Alice Walker- a writer and activist best known for
her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Color Purple.

Alice Miller- a psychoanalyst best known for
the book The Drama of the Gifted Child , in which
she blamed society, with its focus on adults and
resultant neglect of children, for the crime of
psychological child abuse.

Alice Waters - a chef and activist who has been
involved in the organic food movement since
the 1960s.

Fictional Alices include Lewis Carroll’s; “television
Alices” (Alice Kramden from The Honeymooners and

Alice the housekeeper from The Brady Bunch), and
“movie Alices” ( Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore , Alice in
the Cities , and Woody Allen’s Alice ).

Sarah questioned the popularity of the name Al¬
ice and speculated that it might have derived from
Princess Alice, the daughter of Queen Victoria. She
ended by bringing us full circle to the Alice proto¬
types where she started—with the “original” Alice,
this time as the adult Alice Liddell Hargreaves.

Sarah asked another question to move further
into her theory: “Is Alice a malady?” She answered the
question by using an alliterative set of generalities to
describe the various personality traits and behaviors
of the Alice prototypes:

• Alice is Reactive - She becomes herself by
reacting to what she sees. Here, Sarah turned
to the familiar dialogue between Alice and the
Caterpillar. Alice questions herself when she is
questioned by someone else.

• Alice is Related - She might be nothing without
the people she knows. Examples? Alice Kram-
den is Ralph Kramden’s wife, Alice Coltrane is
John Coltrane’s wife, Alice B. Toklas is Gertrude
Stein’s confidante and partner.

•Alice is Resistant - She reacts by resisting. Here,
the examples are Alice Liddell, as she is photo¬
graphed in the famous defiant ragamuffin pose;
Alice James, who resists death; and Alice Miller,
who repudiated the work of Sigmund Freud and
Carl Jung.

• Alice is Remote - She is alien to herself and sees
herself by looking in. Carroll’s Alice is the ex¬
ample, when she grows so large that she speaks
to her feet as if they are not a part of her.

•Alice is Reflective - Again, Carroll’s Alice is the
example, this time from Looking-Glass.

• Alice is Recessive - She is a “willing shadow” to
more dominant personalities. The examples
here are Alice B. Toklas and Alice Coltrane.

•Alice is Regressive - Alice cannot be a mother
because she is literally and figuratively a child.

•Alice Rejects motherhood - The examples here
are Alice Longworth’s difficult relationship
with her daughter Paulina, Alice Neel’s painted
depiction of a maternity ward as a mental institu¬
tion, and Carroll’s Alice and her encounter with
a baby who turns into a pig.

• Alice lives a Reduced life - She is too tiny or too
deprived of space. Again, Alice B. Toklas is an
example, as is Carroll’s Alice at various places
along her journey.

•Alice Retreats - to other worlds. Examples here
include Woody Allen’s Alice, Grace Slick and Jef¬
ferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” and Carroll’s
Alice at the beginning of her adventure (“Eat
Me,” “Drink Me”).

Sarah concluded by returning to Alice’s conversation
with Humpty Dumpty. However, where the original
heading for the quote was “The Shape I Am,” the fi¬
nal heading is “The Shape Am I.” In other words, it
isn’t the shape that defines Alice, but Alice who de¬
fines the shape. Perhaps Sarah said it best when she
said that none of the Alices fits a conventional mode.
And perhaps there is another “R” that should be here:
Alice is Resilient. All of the prototypes describe girls/
women who have defied society’s rules and created
lives of their own in some fashion. Alice B. Toklas be¬
came an author; Alice Walker defied sexism and rac¬
ism and created the term “womanist” to define black
women’s feminism; Alice Coltrane became a musi¬
cian in her own right; Alice Neel became a feminist
icon; and Alice James suffered with breast cancer, but
refused to give in to her body’s increasing deteriora¬
tion—rather, in defiance of the expected, she reveled
in her illness and celebrated it. If these Alices repre¬
sent a malady, these days it seems that more and more
women might be afflicted with it.

The final speaker was Mark Samuels Lasner—
collector, bibliographer, typographer, and senior re¬
search fellow at the University of Delaware Library.

Photo by Alan Tannenbaum

Photo by Cindy Watter

Earlier in the year the Library received the generous
gift of his collection of Victorian literature and art.
However, his presentation “I Am Not a Carroll Collec¬
tor” may seem an odd choice for a LCSNA meeting.
He explained that while Carroll was arguably the most
famous Victorian author, he unfortunately lacked the
fortune necessary to be a completist collector of his
work, preferring to concentrate on three Victorians
on whom he has done significant bibliographic re¬
search—William Ailingham, Aubrey Beardsley, and
Max Beerbohm. (When Lasner opined that Wonder¬
land “has been read, illustrated, parodied, translated,
referred to, edited, and transmogrified into other me¬
dia more than any other work of the period . . . even
more than Sherlock Holmes,” he appreciated a few
good-natured jeers and boos from several dedicated
Sherlockians in the audience.)

He stated that no Victorian collection would be
complete without Carroll and that he sought out items
that would also reflect the pre-Raphaelite focus at the
University of Delaware. He told of purchasing cop¬
ies of Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

for £60 in the late 1970s that had been inscribed by
Carroll to Joan Severn, John Ruskin’s cousin and later-
in-life caretaker. He also found a copy of The Game of
Logic in France inscribed to Bartholomew Price, Car-
roll’s teacher at Oxford, whose nickname inspired
“Twinkle, twinkle little bat.” Some of Lasner’s Carroll
collection was on display for LCSNA conference at¬
tendees, including a copy of the 1886 facsimile edi¬
tion of the Under Ground manuscript. He concluded
by speaking of his own adventures, such as spending
all day in 95-degree weather in a storage unit in Van¬
couver, British Columbia, where he later discovered
he had unknowingly purchased an album containing
not one, but three Carroll photographs, one of which
was only the second known copy!

An enjoyable reception, hosted by the English
Department, followed at Memorial Hall.

[Our thanks to the LCSNA members who contributed to this
article: Bronna Butler, August Imholtz, Stephanie Lovett,
Beverly Pittman, Robert Stek, and Cindy Watter. -Ed.]

David Schaefer and the letter from a student at a previous reading.

Drawing the Looking-Glass Country

DMITRY YERMOLOVICH

I llustrators do not often explain why they have
drawn their pictures the way they did. What in¬
spires them and what they think as they take
up a pencil or a stylus remain confined to a “black
box.” But some readers are quite keen to know what
thoughts and ideas have crossed the artist’s mind.

A recent bilingual edition of Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking-Glass 1 included my Russian trans¬
lation of it and my color illustrations (following a sim¬
ilar edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ). 2 The
books also contained my comments on the Carroll
translator’s challenges.

Like translation, illustration is a decision-driven
process. The idea of writing about it came to me later
and took final shape as an online essay in Russian. 3
This article is an extract from it, focusing on six out
of the book’s eighteen color pictures.

A literary description is fundamentally different
from a graphic image. In words, only some parts of
a scene are described in detail, while others may not
be mentioned at all. An artist cannot normally depict
just some details and leave blank spots elsewhere. The
scene has to be depicted complete with all its parts,
whether mentioned in the text or not. What the book
doesn’t say has to be created, preferably in line with
the author’s concept.

But so much for general statements: welcome in¬
side the black box of an illustrator’s mind.

In Figure 1 (page 12), I wanted—paradoxically
enough for a dream tale—to achieve a degree of au¬
thenticity and recreate a room in a typical mid-nine¬
teenth-century style. My research led me to conclude
that the English middle class of the period liked to
have a large bay window in the living room, with a
fireplace wall at a right angle to it, and this is how I
designed my looking-glass room.

In the tale, Alice suspects from the very start that
the invisible sides of things may turn out to be very
different from what we expect. For me, this meant
that the “back” of the fireplace had to differ from its
front, preferably in a weird way. Carroll seems to have
meant that, too, as he wrote that the mantelpiece
clock had the face of a grinning old man.

The idea of portraits making faces made me
think of eighteenth-century Austrian sculptor Franz

Messerschmidt, famous for his “character heads,”
or busts with countenances contorted into exag¬
gerated emotions. They inspired me as I drew the
two figureheads that adorn the mantelpiece. (The
reader will surely know that artists often allude, in
their pictures, to the work of their colleagues. One
example is Tenniel’s Duchess, roughly based on a
portrait by Quentin Matsys.)

Carroll also wrote that the pictures on the wall
“seemed to be all alive.” To me, this meant they had to
be three-dimensional, and I drew a man’s head stick¬
ing out of a picture frame and making a face, also in
the style of Messerschmidt.

Some people wonder why I decided to make my
Alice red-haired. Well, Carroll never specified his
character’s hair color. Alice Liddell had black hair,
but the writer never wanted his heroine to look like
her, and Tenniel drew her as a blonde.

But why couldn’t the Alice of the book be red-
haired? The English are famous for their ginger roy¬
als and celebrities, such as Henry VTII, Elizabeth I,
Prince Harry, or Eddie Redmayne (a telling name!).
Studies have found that “a third of the population of
Britain and Ireland carry red hair genes.” 4 Not only
does red hair add to my Alice’s Englishness, but red is
an advantageous color from the artistic point of view.

On the table, Alice finds a book with the poem
“Jabberwocky.” I drew it as a miniature copy of John
Tenniel’s drawing, another allusion to a favorite art¬
ist. (My own version of the beast is different, but I’ll
discuss it later.)

In Figure 2 we are looking at the same fireplace
and “character” heads. As in the first illustration, the
carpet on the floor has a chessboard pattern, for obvi¬
ous reasons. When drawing the table on which Alice
put the White Queen, I decided to make it a chess
table with a malachite top, to complement the red-
brown tones of the fireplace and carpet with a con¬
trasting color, green.

Behind the table, parts of the wallpaper’s floral
design combine into another weird head, that of a
woman with puffy cheeks. I did it entirely for fun and
as another indication that one can expect anything
to appear on the back of things, which one doesn’t
normally see.

Figure 1

Figure 2

In drawing chess pieces (the White King, Queen,
and Pawn), I tried to reproduce a typical “wooden”
texture while giving them a degree of plasticity. As for
the White Queen, she is, as we know, a truly weird
character who will eventually drown in a tureen, so I
gave her a troubled face with big round eyes.

Now the fire screen, or fender. In another tribute
to Tenniel, I re-drew his famous image in thick simpli¬
fied lines, making sure that no part of the lattice looks
as if it could fall out (and not forgetting to embed
my initials in Russian, D and E, in it). Then I turned
the drawing into a 3D object and made it part of this
picture and the previous one.

Figure 3 took me twice as long as any other. In
fact, it is two drawings in one.

Let’s begin with its lower half. Sitting opposite
Alice (and seen through her eyes) is a gentleman
dressed in white paper. He is lecturing Alice with a
raised finger (“So young a child ought to know which
way she is going”). Yet I pictured him as a bon vivant,
hence a cigar in his other hand; his red cheeks and
nose indicate he has probably had one or two for the
road. We have, I believe, all met with this type of pas¬
senger: a good-natured man who easily enters into
conversations, but quickly turns into a nuisance.

The seating of two passengers in my drawing is
slightly at odds with the book. The Goat is not right
next to the Gentleman in White Paper—I placed the
Beetle between them. I didn’t want a clutter of big
bodies: some breathing space was needed. Above the
Beetle, another group of passengers can be seen, in-

Figure 3

eluding the Horse. And on their right, I added a train
attendant with a fox’s head. It is not the Guard men¬
tioned by Carroll, but he is checking tickets as well.

And now a digression concerning the clothing
of animal characters. Tenniel dressed his animals

inconsistently. His White Rabbit wears only a waist¬
coat and gloves (and a pair of pants during the
trial). The Dodo and the Mouse walk around with
no clothes on, while the March Hare drinks tea in a
full suit. I followed the same policy—or rather lack
thereof—leaving the Beetle with no clothing, but
dressing the Goat in a long coat. However, so as to
show its hooves, I gave it no shoes. Fox the conduc¬
tor is, of course, in full uniform.

Carroll was being mischievous to the limit as he
made a passenger remark, “She must draw the train
herself the rest of the way!” I grasped at this and made
it the subject of the top picture in a speech bubble. As
the bubble’s tail has to lead somewhere, I pointed it at
a woman with a bright orange hat ribbon which stands
out visually as if to indicate: she’s the one who said it!

Inside the bubble, a red-faced and sweating Al¬
ice is pulling the locomotive with an inhuman effort.
This nonsense was fun to draw. It also led me to un¬
dertake a short study of nineteenth-century steam
locomotives. I found that most had a shelf in front,
onto which an oil lamp with a reflector was fastened. I
intended the cone of light from the lamp, contrasting
with a gloomy clouded sky, to create an added dra¬
matic effect, along with bats flying over Alice. And,
since she is pulling the engine, the role of the engine
driver (whom I portrayed as a guinea-pig) is reduced
to watching over her and blowing the steam whistle.

Figure 4 depicts the “tragic” finale of “The Walrus
and the Carpenter” poem. It follows from the White

Queen’s riddle that oysters were dirt cheap in Eng¬
land at the time. Presumably, the writer and his child
friends ate them often. The poem thus turns a famil¬
iar everyday experience, a cheap treat, into a mock
tragedy. It is also a spoof of moralizing poems that
warned children against disobeying good advice. I am
sure that Carroll’s child friends would dissolve into
laughter when the poem was read to them. So the pic¬
ture had to be drawn with a fair share of humor.

Its layout was a challenge, too. It is easiest to de¬
pict a meal in a horizontal, or landscape, format, with
eaters seated next to or facing one another. But the
book’s vertical page format dictated that the Walrus
and the Carpenter be placed one above the other, as
if watched from an elevation. I seated them separately
and made them look different ways, remembering
that the Walrus was “ashamed” to look the Carpenter
and the uneaten oysters in the eyes. This is also why I
depicted him with his back to them.

Before drawing the eaters, I watched several oys¬
ter festival videos online and found that most people
gnaw shellfish out of shells and throw their heads
back so that no oyster juice may miss their lips. This is
exactly the position of my Carpenter. For added em¬
phasis, his newspaper hat is falling off his head. He is
lifting a poor oyster to his wide-open mouth with his
left hand, while his right hand holds an ominously
shining knife, which he needs to open oyster shells. I
also drew the shameless Carpenter with eyes rolled up
in anticipation of pleasure.

Unlike his friend, the Walrus cannot bite oysters
out of their shells with his huge tusks, so he uses a
fork for the purpose, while the emptied shell remains
in his left flipper. Real-life flippers are not good for
holding things, so I had to manage to make them
look sufficiently dexterous for the task.

I gave the Walrus a bib to underscore his hypoc¬
risy, showing that he was even better equipped for the
deceit than the Carpenter.

As for the oysters, I wanted to give them distinc¬
tive personalities, each reacting differently to its im¬
minent death. One is numb with horror, another is
trying to protest, yet another hopes to escape, a fourth
one is bowing to her fate—and so on. I hope these
characterizations help reproduce Carroll’s sense of
mock tragedy, contrasting with a romantic and peace¬
ful sea with a tall ship in the distance.

Figure 5 represents these lines:

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood . . .

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

My hero’s sword has just chopped off the beast’s head,
the trophy with which he will “galumph back” home.
The sword keeps moving by inertia, and blood is still
gushing from the Jabberwock’s severed neck.

The poem was a spoof of Anglo-Saxon literature,
which Victorian children had to study—thoroughly
enough so Carroll’s parody made them laugh, no
doubt. John Tenniel conveyed the laughing spirit by
putting a waistcoat on the monster. Nothing else!

I, too, decided to make my Jabberwock look funny
in polka-dot panties and bedroom slippers. To contrast
the improbable with the authentic, I browsed through
scores of images of Victorian-era slippers and stum¬
bled on a pair that looked surprisingly similar to those
of my (then) little cousin in the late 1950s (for some
reason, I still remember them). So my Jabberwock’s
slippers happen to be Soviet-styled as well as Victorian.

And now to the monster killer. Tenniel drew him
as a young boy, something that has always surprised
me. Shouldn’t a monster-killer be a strong adult man?
They are usually played by bodybuilders in the movies.

My hero is a strongman. But why is he wearing
shorts, you may ask? Well, in old drawings, most epic
heroes are dressed in short tunics with nothing to
cover their legs. Some contemporary artists have tak¬
en the tradition further. In Robert Zemeckis’s 2007
version of Beowulf, the protagonist prepares to meet
with Grendel by undressing himself completely, ap¬
parently to remove any hindrance to the impact of his
physical energy. Well, I didn’t need my hero to go all
the way along that path, so I gave him a pair of shorts.

Figure 6

Consider them a conventional fig leaf, or a jocular
anachronism to match the Jabberwock’s underwear.

In terms of layout, the hero had to be lifted from
the ground to reach the Jabberwock’s neck, given the
monster’s size. At first, I put him on a horse, but it
looked somehow out of place. Then I toyed with a step-
ladder—’’but that would be going too far,” as Mary Pop-
pins once said. Finally, I put my hero on a tree stump—a
most natural thing to be found in a tulgey wood.

It was fun drawing this illustration, and it is one
of my favorites in the series.

In Figure 6, we again see a “two-story” picture, but
here the “first floor” takes up about two-thirds of the
image. Let’s start from the “ground floor,” however.

The White Queen tells Alice that she lives back¬
wards, while sticking a large piece of plaster on her
finger. Now, an anatomical digression. In my picture,
she has only four fingers on each hand—why is that?

Let me start with some background. As I have
written earlier, it was a daring literary innovation of
Lewis Carroll’s that he supplied many of his animal
characters with “arms,” “hands,” and other human
features. 5 The idea was adopted by artists, including
Disney, Hanna-Barbera, and others, who also came
up with the convention of making the “hands” of
their human-like cartoon characters four-fingered.
Their reasons are not sufficiently clear. I believe they
wanted to emphasize the purely conventional and
fictional nature of those “funny animals” as distinct
from human beings. (I have read explanations that

four-fingered hands are simply easier to draw, but
they cannot be taken seriously.)

I followed the convention in the case of my funny
animals—and chess pieces as well. They are not peo¬
ple either, which is why the White Queen has four¬
fingered hands and gloves.

And now to the upper “story” of the picture. It
is, of course, in a speech bubble as it refers to the
Queen’s words: “There’s the King’s Messenger. He’s
in prison now, being punished.”

So here he is, the messenger Hatta, in striped
prison uniform and chained to a pillar. When draw¬
ing the interior of his prison, I recalled the Chillon
castle near Montreux in Switzerland, made famous
by Lord Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon.” I have
visited the castle and taken quite a number of pho¬
tos inside. The vaulted room where the prisoner of
Chillon languished inspired the interior you see in
my illustration, although it is far from being an exact
representation.

Now let’s look at some details. In my illustrations
to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , I drew all kinds of
impossible objects, such as a Penrose/Escher stair¬
case, a twisted bridge, and others. Hatta’s prison is a
great place for more impossible objects, to emphasize
the absurdity of “living backwards” (the man is serv¬
ing a sentence before being tried or even committing
a crime).

First I played with the columns, drawing some
with no bases and some with no tops, dissolving in
emptiness. Two columns have ambiguous spatial po¬
sitions: they are both farther away and closer to the
viewer than the cell window.

Secondly, in the back of the room, there is a lad¬
der leading up to a door. If you take a closer look you
will find that the ladder is also an impossible object.

Having drawn the door, I felt like adding another
figure, that of a prison guard with a pig’s head. After
all, what is a door for if not to allow guards to check
what the inmates are doing?

Hatta, who is sitting on the floor, is so unhappy
he is in tears. We will learn later in the book that he
was fed poorly in jail. So I added a rat brazenly eating
the prisoner’s bread and drinking from his mug. A
“long and sad tale” has unfolded out of the Queen’s
casual remark.

Limited space does not allow me to discuss the
remaining twelve illustrations—a task I may pursue in
a later contribution. I believe, however, that I have
made clearer what went on in my “black box” as I was
doing my pictures, and how they are connected with
the writer’s words and messages. An illustrator’s imag¬
ination can, of course, soar to unlimited heights, but
the text being illustrated is its best fuel.

1 , .

... .— .: , 2017. (TTLG, trans., annot., and

illustr. by Dmitry Yermolovich). ISBN 978-5990794320.

2 , .

. — 2- .— .: ,2017. (AATVV, trans.,annot.,

and illustr. by Dmitry Yermolovich). ISBN 978-
5990794344.

3 See http://yermolovich.ru/index/0-219.

4 The Telegraph, August 24, 2013.

5 Yermolovich, Dmitry. “As You Translate, So Shall You Draw.”
Knight Letter. Fall 2016. Vol II, issue 27, No. 97, p. 13.

UHDdriBEAUORI? IT MEANS
JUST UHfiT r CHOOSE \T To MEM
MOTHER MORE NOR LESS.

I WONDER lHAT ALL THOSE
U 0 RDS NDU JUST SAID rlEANT
maybe yOure tclljng me r

CAN HWEALLSDUR STUFF!

UHffll? NO!
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Your car too?
GOSH, THANKS!

§.

^ 3 -

Is snark Part of a Cyrillic Doublet?

VICTOR FET (S’MICHAEL EVERSON

T he etymology of the word “snark” is enig-
matic-although less so than its meaning.
Lewis Carroll himself told Beatrice Hatch
that “snark” is a portmanteau word (snail + shark).
Other combinations are also possible, such as snake +
shark and the like. Portmanteau words, which Carroll
discussed in his Preface to The Hunting of the Snark
(Richard + William = Rilchiam), link the poem to the
second Alice book, specifically to “Jabberwocky” and
Humpty Dumpty.

A single-letter difference between “snark” and
“shark” resembles a Carrollian Doublets-style pun.
The Doublets game, also known as Word Ladders,
was first formally published by Carroll in Vanity Fair
in 1879 (after both Alice books and The Hunting of the
Snark) . It is a word transformation game, possibly one
of the simplest of all linguistic/alphabetical games.
The game was first played by Carroll on Christmas
1877 with two girls who complained that they had
“nothing to do,” and was initially named “Word-links.”

Carroll’s original 1879 pamphlet, Doublets , had a
Glossary “of all well-known English words ... of 3, 4, 5,
or 6 letters each, which can be used in good society.”
It did not list the Snark, but one can easily obtain it
from five-letter words in the Glossary by transforming
a single letter not only in “shark” but also in “snare,”
“snarl,” “stark,” or “snack”—or two letters in “snake”
or “snail” (both via “snare,” which is, of course, a
hunting technique).

Note that the very first of Carroll’s original Dou¬
blets, published March 29, 1878, in Vanity Fair, appears
to be directly related to The Hunting of the Snark (Fit
the Sixth, “The Barrister’s Dream”). There is no com¬
ment on this in Gardner’s Annotated Snark (2006).
The task is to “drive pig into sty.” Carroll’s solution
was PIG-PIT-SIT-SAT-SAY-STY.

Another interesting sequence (dated May 10,
1879) is Darwinian: to turn ape to man (Darwin’s
Descent of Man had appeared in 1871). A good Car¬
rollian Doublets sequence is also: Alice-slice-slick-
slack- SNACK- SNARK.

Carroll is considered an official inventor of this
game, but surely similar games were known earlier. He
notes, “I am told that there is an American game involv¬
ing a similar principle. I have never seen it... .” There

are Doublet-style puns in Carroll’s previous works, such
as the famous pig/fig of the Cheshire Cat, which is also a
single-letter transformation.

The Doublets game bears an uncanny resem¬
blance to the essence of modifications of the funda¬
mental chemical language of life. The simplest genet¬
ic code “point mutations” (substitutions) are changes
in a single “letter” (nucleotide) in a three-letter DNA
“word” (codon).

Most Anglophone Carrollians might not be aware
of the sweeping conjectures that Jean Perrot made
about Carroll’s Russian journey in summer 1867, the
only foreign trip in his life. Perrot suggested that the
Russian journey strongly influenced the genesis of
Through the Looking-Glass (1871), including, but not
limited to, the train scene, the chess theme, the White
Knight’s ballad, some words from “Jabberwocky,” and
even the name Haigha, which Perrot derives from a
Russian folkloric witch, Yagha.

While all this is rather conjectural, we know from
his Russian Journal, etc., that Carroll was indeed acute¬
ly aware of the exotic Russian language and alphabet.
He wrote down a survival word list, and tried his best
reading signs, and even speaking to Russian hotel
servants and taxi drivers. He copied, largely correctly,
menu items of the Russian restaurants. In his letter
to Maud Standen of August 28, 1890, Carroll com¬
mented that he “used to know the [Russian] alphabet
pretty well.”

Carroll’s brief struggle with the Russian Cyrillic
alphabet was obviously alleviated by his knowledge of
the Greek alphabet, with which he was well familiar.
There are twelve letters, all originally derived from
Greek, which are exactly the same in the Latin/Eng¬
lish alphabet and the Russian Cyrillic of 1867: A, B,
C, E, H, I, K, M, O, P, T, X (the letter I has not been
used in Russian since 1918). Of these twelve letters,
only four (B, H, P, X) designate sounds different from
English ones, and of these four, only H designates
in Russian a sound very different from the classical
Greek.

In Russian Cyrillic, the letter en (h, H) is used for
the “n” sound; thus, CHAPK is pronounced “SNARK.”
(To confuse matters, the capital form of the Greek
letter eta [r\, H] looks like the capital Cyrillic en, but

eta actually evolved into the Cyrillic i [h, H]; both are
pronounced “i.” The Greek nu [v, N] was the source
for the Cyrillic en.)

Alice’s most famous (and only) foreign-language
phrase is “ Ou est ma chatteT The French CH is pho¬
netically equivalent to the English SH. At the same
time, the Cyrillic III is SH in English, but the Cyrillic
CH is SN in English, and SNARKis transliterated into
Russian as CHAPK.

In his struggle with the Russian alphabet, Carroll
had to confront both CH and SH. A long word An¬
drew Muir wrote down for him on the train going to
Russia (see The Russian Journal), was a scary
(ZASHCHISHCHAIUSHCHIKHSIA , a genitive of a par¬
ticiple meaning “of people defending themselves”).
This word, which Humpty Dumpty would be proud
of, includes three instances of the infamous Russian
consonant m. To represent it in English requires four
letters, SHCH. Vladimir Nabokov advised that the
best way to pronounce III, is as in “poSH CHair” (see
his pronunciation guide to his translation of Eugene
Onegin, 1964). Thus both SH and CH lurk very close
to the surface for producing SNARK.

According to Carroll’s own recollection, the
line “ For the Snark was a Boojum, you see ...” appeared
(“came into my head”) to him on July 18, 1874, in
Guildford. If we believe Carroll—and there is no rea¬
son not to do so—then both the Snark and Boojum

names were subconsciously produced, within a single
line of poetry.

We suggest, therefore, that the word SNARK
could have been generated by a collision of the Latin
and Cyrillic alphabets in a cross-alphabet Doublet
fashion. SNARK can be seen as a result of reading a
Latin/English character H in SHARK as an exotic Cy¬
rillic character, producing the sound [n]. A change
from SHARK to SNARK thus can be seen as a Dou¬
blets interlanguage pun set in a mix of the English/
Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, with an additional im¬
pact of the SH/CH combination.

The same letter confusion was famously used in
Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934),
where a Russian aristocrat drops a handkerchief em¬
broidered with letter H, which in fact reads “N” and
stands for the name Natalia “HaTajnui” (Dragomiroff).

There are other similar cases of erroneous or
humorous readings of the Latin alphabet by the Rus¬
sians as Cyrillic, and vice versa, some being old school
puns. Some involve more than one letter: In Three Sis¬
ters by Anton Chekhov (1900), for example, a high
school student famously misreads the Russian word
uenyxa ( chepukha, “nonsense”) as a nice-sounding but
meaningless Latin peHHKca ( reniksa ), based on the vi¬
sual similarity.

from Carl Barks’ ‘Land Beneath the Ground!” in Uncle Scrooge Comics #13, March-May 1956

USC Libraries' 13 th Wonderland Award

LINDA CASSADY

T he Wonderland Award is an annual multidis¬
ciplinary event that showcases the creative
and interpretive talents of students from
USC and other Southern California institutions as
they transform the life and writings of Lewis Carroll
into new creative and scholarly works. Goals of the
contest comprise using the Cassady Lewis Carroll Col¬
lection, held at Doheny Memorial Library at USC,
to promote Curiosity, Discovery, and Creativity. Sub¬
missions this year included short films, art, a perfor¬
mance/music video, fiction,
a musical, an art installation,
photography, an augmented
reality book, and poetry.

The six judges evaluated
each submission for Quality,

Carrollian Spirit, Originality,
and the accompanying Artist
Statement. The distinguished
judges were Peter Hanff, dep¬
uty director of the Bancroft
Library at the University of
California, Berkeley; Molly
Bendall, poet and USC pro¬
fessor of English; Lisa Mann,

USC professor of cinematic arts; Amanda Kennell,
USC PhD candidate, Mellon Digital Humanities fel¬
low, and the first USC Carrollian Scholar; Sara Fen¬
ton, last year’s first-place winner and a Cinematic Arts
graduate student; and myself.

Azusa Pacific University commercial music major
Steven Schmidt, along with friends Cristian Guerrero
and Chandler Patton, took home the new $10,000
Charles Dodgson Prize for the original composi¬
tion Mad World: A New Musical , which included the
full script, production photos, libretto, and nineteen
audio recordings. The award sponsors, Linda and
George Cassady MD, bestowed the prize for the win¬
ners’ astonishing work on their submissions and the
promise shown for future professional work and de¬
velopment.

“We started writing this when we were in high
school, and it is something that has kept us together
for a long time. There were profound moments when
it felt like the spirit of Charles Dodgson was in the

room with us,” Schmidt said in accepting the award
at Doheny Memorial Library on April 20. “I was ex¬
cited to come here and be surrounded by so many
other people who were touched by the diversity of his
work—in the arts, in logic and math.”

Three USC students from the Interactive Media
and Games division of the USC School of Cinematic
Arts and another from the USC Thornton School of
Music earned first prize ($3,000, sponsored by a gen¬
erous anonymous donor from Society) at the event.

Yiwen Dai, Kelsey Rice,
Jung-Ho Sohn, and Uriel
Vanchestein topped the
field of two dozen with
“What Is It But a Dream?”
Their work included a
hand-bound red cloth
book, similar to the first
editions of the Alice books,
that operates in conjunc¬
tion with an augmented-
reality iPhone app, like a
digital looking-glass. Play¬
ing cards keyed to the app
can be inserted throughout
the book, giving the viewer a chance to create his or
her own Carrollian narratives (www.youtube.com/
watch?v=VaB8IktjI5Q).

The second prize, $1,500, went to Cinematic Arts
student Alex Haney for Iconoclast. The short film,
which focused on one person’s struggle to balance
his mixed-race, half-Jewish, and gay identities, in¬
corporates a multitude of familiar Carrollian images
in fresh ways. Iconoclast (youtu.be/2PIg2IwMU9g)
has subsequently been well received at a number of
highly regarded film festivals, including the Cannes
Short Film Corner, the Oscar-qualifying Calgary In¬
ternational Film Festival, the National Film Festival
for Talented Youth, and the Berlin Flash Film Festival.

Amy Plummer, a Society member, provides all
of the Wonderland Award winners with a bonus one-
year membership in the LCSNA. She has generously
participated in supporting the award in this manner
for several years. Thanks, Amy!

FI "n^lXI" L^WI5 ^fiRR2LL RV22L^

CLARE IMHOLTZ

mong some of his enthusiasts, Lewis Car-
roll’s puzzles are more important than his
books. I am not one of those people, but
I recently came across a virtually unknown anagram-
matic puzzle by Carroll. I found it online in, of all
places, the June 1898 issue of The Observatory : a month¬
ly review of astronomy (Volume 21, no. 267), in the
“Notes” column, pages 254-6. (Digital copies can be
found at several sites, including Hathitrust.org.) The
author, who I suspect was Henry Park Hollis (1858-
1939), one of the journal’s editors at the time, first
discusses the recent sale of Carroll’s effects, and then
presents the puzzle:

We have had a rather exciting sale at Oxford
this last month, the books and other properties
of the late Rev. C. L. Dodgson (known to most
of the world as ‘Lewis Carroll’) having been put
up to auction. They went for rather good prices:
people in Oxford seem to know pretty well the
market price of books, and are also ready to give
a few extra shillings for sentiment when the li¬
brary of an eminent man comes to the hammer.
One of the cheaper lots, for instance, which
went for 42s., was De Morgan’s Budget of Para¬
doxes, with a few odd volumes. I was not able
to be at the sale more than a few minutes, and
do not know what price was fetched by other
books interesting to the scientific world, such as,
for instance, the author’s copies of ‘Euclid and
his modern imitators [sic].’ But I see from the
‘Oxford Magazine’ that the first edition of ‘Alice
in Wonderland,’ dated 1865, and bound in vel¬
lum, with a short poem of 12 lines by the author

to M. A. B. on the flyleaf, was purchased by Mrs.
Bickmore for £50; the first edition of ‘Through
the Looking-glass’ fetched £24, and so on.

Does the world know how fond he was of
puzzles? Here is one that he made on rather
original lines. The following five questions are all
to be answered by the use of the same letters (all
and no more) anagrammatically transposed: —

1. When are you going to make your will?

2. Shall I write it for you in pencil?

3. Under what circumstances may a man leave all
his money to charities?

4. What did the uncle say when he heard this?

5. What did the nephew say when his uncle left
him all his money?

It is a rather difficult puzzle to state properly,
and this is not a puzzle-magazine: hence I had
better give a little more help than usual. The
answer to the first question is “Now, I think,”
and to the fourth is “Hint! I know.” Perhaps
the others can be guessed.

The author concludes by devoting a few paragraphs
to his appreciation of Carroll’s delightful mathemati¬
cal humor.

The puzzle has since been reprinted twice that I
know of (in the Bombay Law Journal , June 1936, Vol¬
ume 14, No. 1 p. 54, and in Sussex County Magazine,
1941, Volume 15, p. 334), but seems otherwise to have
escaped notice.

Answers to the challenges appear below.

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AUGUST A. IMHOLTZ, JR.

T he digitization of large corpora of British
and American newspapers from the past two
centuries has brought to light many curious
and previously forgotten items about Lewis Carroll.
Here are two examples.

Degeneration

(Mr. “Lewis Carroll” has published an elementary
treatise on Logic.)

Listen, Alice, and bewail;

Your historian and rhymer,

Weaver of your wondrous tale,

Needs must write a logic primer;

No more peeps henceforth alas,

Through the magic Looking-Glass!

He will teach you sneers and pshaws,

How to argue and wrangle,

Find out fallacies and flaws

In your dream’s delicious tangle;

Slay once more the Jabberwock,

And at your Mock-turtle mock.

Red and white queens will not move,

As they once did unassisted;

You will now be taught to prove

No such things could have existed:

Snarks will vanish (well-a-day!)

Softly, suddenly away.

So a protest let us make

(Sadly, for we bear no malice);

Humbly say: “For pity’s sake,

Less of Logic, more of Alice,

As you used to ‘carol’ on

Lewis! And forget the don.”

Anonymous. Published in the newspaper The Star ,
Saint Peter Port, England, March 5, 1896, p. 1. That
“Lewis Carroll” was a pseudonym was of course by that
date well known. The “treatise on logic” is Symbolic
Logic. Part I (London and New York, Macmillan and
Company, 1896).

Less than two years after the appearance of “Degen¬
eration” in print, Bernard Malcolm Ramsay published
the following poem on the death of Lewis Carroll.

King of Wonderland
In Memoriam Lewis Carroll

Don’t you remember, Alice, years ago
In Wonderland we wandered—you and I?

You—strange pedantic child! With “how”
and “why.”

And “wherefore” vexed my simpler faith, I know;
But never could I bear to let you go
Till you had satisfied my eager eye
With marvels that none other could supply;

And, Alice, all the while I loved you so!

Now we are older, Alice—you and I;

And I have viewed the wonders that are spread
Throughout my Sorrowland of hope and fear.
Still do your charms dwell dear in memory.

Alas! Your King of Wonderland is dead;

Come! Hand in hand we’ll stand beside his bier.

Published in the newspaper The Weekly Standard and
Express of Blackburn, England, Jan. 22, 1898, p. 6, and
in other papers.

Bernard Malcolm Ramsay was a minor, a very minor,
British poet and songwriter. Perhaps his best remem¬
bered work is London Lays, and Other Poems (London:
E. Stock, 1903).

Leaves piom
rbe Deaneny Ganden

A query to holders of the 1866
edition of Alice’s Adventures in Won¬
derland published in New York by
D. Appleton and Co.:

There were 1,952 copies of
what has come to be known as
“The Appleton Alice,” and it turns
out to be an elusive book to locate.
The British Library is the only
institutional holder found in the
UK. Some 70 institutional holders
are found in the U.S. and Canada
and one in Switzerland. Fewer
than 20 private holders have been
identified.

When Macmillan published
the first edition of Alice in 1865, it
was promptly suppressed because
the illustrator, John Tenniel, was
dissatisfied with the quality of the
illustrations. Forty-eight copies
had been bound up for friends of
Lewis Carroll, leaving 1,952 sets of
sheets from the original print run
of 2,000. These sheets were sold to
the firm of D. Appleton and Co.

in New York. They were bound in
London with the Appleton title
page as a cancel.

We have a new book in process
with the working title Much of a
Muchness: The English Language
Editions of the Four Alice Books. The
four books are: Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland , Through the Looking-
Glass , Alice’s Adventures Under
Ground, and The Nursery 'Alice. ”

In our new book we plan to
include a census of holders of the
1866 Appleton Alice, and informa¬
tion on which version each institu¬
tion or person holds. It turns out
that there are four versions of the
book, with no priority. The sup¬
pressed sheets of the 1865 Macmil¬
lan Alice exist in two variants, “A”
and “a.” The cancel Appleton title
page also exists in two variants, 1
and 2.

The differences in the 1865
sheets can be identified by the
last stanza of the prefatory poem.
Variant “A” begins “Alice! A child¬

ish—.” In variant “a” it begins
“Alice! a childish—.”

The Appleton cancel title page
was printed in duplicate, and
the two versions differ slightly.

In variant 1 the B in “By” on the
title page is directly above the T
in “Tenniel,” and in variant 2 it is
above and just to the right of the T.

Copies of each of the four ver¬
sions have been located.

If you have a copy of the 1866
Appleton Alice, please identify your
variant as 1-A, 1-a, 2-A, or 2-a and
respond tojalindseth@aol.com.

I’m also pleased to announce
that George Cassady, who has been
working with us on this project, is
now Research Professor of Bibliog¬
raphy and Library Management at
USC Libraries.

Jon Lindseth

I learned long ago that being
Lewis Carroll was infinitely more
exciting than being Alice.

Joyce Carol Oates (attributed)

Q. What was the first book you fell in
love with t

A. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ,
by Lewis Carroll. Not just for
the obvious reasons ... but
because I fell in love with
Alice’s confidence. There she
is, lost in Wonderland, con¬
stantly changing size, knowing
nothing about her surround¬
ings, and yet she’s so irresist¬
ibly opinionated, always telling
people off and snapping her
fingers at the mighty, You’re
nothing but a pack of cards.
My kind of girl.

Salman Rushdie , interviewed
on Literary Hub (lithub.com),
September 5, 2017

-X-

Kafka, he thought, and then,
more appropriately, he felt,

Lewis Carroll.

Alexander McCall Smith, My
Italian Bulldozer, Pantheon
Books, New York, 2017

-X-

It was a tough search because
you’ve got to find an actor who
was prepared to play Alice in Won¬
derland as though it was Hamlet.
Charles Fitzsimmons, associate
producer of the Batman TV series
(1966-69), interviewed in the
documentary Holy Batmania
(1989) about Adam West

- M -

He [Jann Wenner] used to send
... [film executive] Barry Diller
long and rambling pitches seeking
advice—What about Alice in Won¬
derland starring Gilda Radner?

Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The
Life and Times of Jann Wenner
and Rolling Stone Magazine,
Knopf 2017

-x-

(That the British monarch should
have two birthdays, his or her
real one and also an official one,
observed in early summer, when
the likelihood of good weather
is at its highest, is a peculiarity of
the national culture that might
have been invented by a children’s
author, perhaps Lewis Carroll.)
Rebecca Mead, “Paddington Bear,
Refugee,” The New Yorker
online, June 28, 2017

- m -

The consultations were being held
in another nondescript multipur¬
pose room: a dozen small, round
tables were spread at even inter¬
vals on its hibiscus-printed carpet.
Each table had a tablecloth with a
sunflower pattern, giving the en¬
tire experience the aura of being
trapped in Alice’s Wonderland.
Rakesh Satyal, No One Can
Pronounce My Name, Picador,
New York, 2017

_ m _

Goth in its first wave—Siouxsie
and the Banshees, the Cure, Bau-
haus—is intense, ethereal, and
dreamlike, a European fairy tale,
a walk in the woods at dusk, Lewis
Carroll in monochrome.

Graeme Thomson, I Shot a
Man in Reno: A History of
Murder, Suicide, Fire, Flood,
Drugs, Disease and General
Misadventure as Related in
Popular Song, Continuum, 2008

He handed me the rifle. Suddenly
the alley looked much longer
than before, as if the target was
receding. I felt like Alice after she
Drank Me, or Ate Me, or which¬
ever ingestion made her become
diminutive ....

Amor Towles, Rules of Civility,
Penguin, 2012

[Witches] sent forth disembodied
creatures, in one case a man’s
head connected to a white cat tail
by several feet of nothingness—
a Cheshire cat centuries before
Lewis Carroll.

Stacy Schiff The Witches: Salem,
1692, Little, Brown and Company,
New York, 2015

If trouble should ever arise, Louise
is simply not there; she fades like
the Cheshire Cat, and comes back
serenely when it is all over.

Mary Stewart, Madam, Will You
Talk?, Fawcett, 1955

“I’m not denying it, but girls aren’t
Frankie’s scene [...]”

“He only does it to annoy,
because he knows it teases,” sug¬
gested John.

Michael Gilbert, The Long
Journey Home, Harper
Publishing, 1985

(She feels another stab at the
thought of his Wonderland collec¬
tion, a further loss. Oh, that pair
of 1920s evening gloves embroi¬
dered with the mad Hatter on one
sleeve, the March Hare on the
other; how she had itched to try
them on!)

Julia Glass, A House Among the
Trees, Pantheon Books, New York,
2017

- m -

The story unfolds from this open¬
ing perfectly logically, at least if
your definition of logic includes,
as surely it should, not only mod¬
ern astrophysics, but Xeno’s para¬
dox, Borges’s Aleph, and the Mad
Hatter’s tea party.

Ursula K. Le Guin, reviewing
Italo Calvino 's The Complete
Cosmicomics, Words Are My
Matter, Small Beer Press, 2016

-X-

This speed was due less to Mrs.
McDermott’s dramatic gifts—al¬
though she did gyre and gimble
quite acceptably—than to the fact
that a bit of the “Jabberwocky” is
an almost inevitable part of any
session of The Game.

Dorothy Parker, (( The Game, ”
Cosmopolitan, December, 1948

- m -

“Yes?” said Reeve. He had an
orange stain on his mouth from
the prawns, the old jabberwock.
“Found something that amuses
you?” ... The party was from six
to nine. I smiled, sweated, tried to
make my way to the bar, only to
get waylaid and cut off and some¬
times physically dragged back by
the arms of Tantalus—“And here
you are, my beamish boy!”

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch,
Little Brown, 2013

- M -

[Peter Wimsey:] ‘You show com¬
mendable patience with my bad
temper.” [Harriet:] “Is that what
you call it? I’ve seen tempers in
comparison with which you’d call
that a burst of heavenly harmony.”
... Then Miss Twitterton chirped
agitatedly to herself: “Oh dear, oh
dear! What has become of it?” ...
Like the White Rabbit—a white
rabbit in a cage... Peter made a
wry face. “You ran like the Red
Queen.”

Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s
Honeymoon, Gollancz, 1937

- m -

Sic’s like Humpty Dumpty in
Through the Looking-Glass. He en¬
joys taking words out for a spin.
Emma Donoghue, The Lotterys
Plus One, Scholastic, New York,
2017

-X-

If we tore down all the statues of
men who had terrible attitudes
toward women, we would not have
anything in Central Park but Alice
in Wonderland and a dancing goat.
Gail Collins, ‘Dogs, Saints, and
Columbus Day, ” The New York
Times, October 7, 2017

-x-

We have passed through the look¬
ing glass and down the rabbit
hole. America has mutated into
Fantasyland.

Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland,
Random House, New York, 2017

Nancy Berry
Sarah Boxer
Bronna Butler
Sarah Crotzer
John DiBattiste
Sara Fenton
Emily Grover
Mary Hurst
Wendy Ice
Goetz Kluge
Sarah Mahler

Sfe Sfe sfe

Tina Martin
Ann Mathewson
Hiroaki Matsuzaki

David Miller
Tena Nestler
Jan Parker
Linda Panther
Ed Reichert
Jung-Ho Sohn
Stephanie Turner
Casey Urbancic
Yu Yu

Alan Yuspeh
Janet Horn Yuspeh

Wolfe von Lenkiewicz’s practice is
a continuum of struggle with art
history, a constant appropriation
of its narratives and rearrange¬
ment of its protagonists into the
artists’ own, contemporary con¬
text. Standing on the ambiguous
line between iconophilia and
iconoclasm, both elevating and
desecrating the canon, Lenkiewicz
creates an ever-expanding wun-
derkammer of references where
history and popular culture merge
into uncanny figures in hyper real
settings.

The exhibition I have an excel¬
lent idea, LETS CHANGE THE
SUBJECT is a bricolage of fictional
and factual worlds where Goering
is put on trial in Alice’s Wonder¬
land and Leonardo da Vinci exists
parallel to Disneyland. The exhi¬
bition comprises of a series of oil
paintings where Pablo Picasso and
John Tenniel’s methods interlock
in a seamless interplay.

Lenkiewicz adopts the episte¬
mological anarchy of Paul Fayera-
bend’s notion of “anything goes”
colliding differing cultural ideolo¬
gies into forced dialogue resulting
in surprising reformations of for¬
merly degenerated truisms back to
life in a modern context. Taking

its name from the utterance of the
Mad Hatter, a character from Lew¬
is Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland , the
exhibition centers on the ambigu¬
ity between history and myth, and
the possibility of an interplay ring
of the two discourses.

From AllVisualArts.org. Aside
from the dead-on satire of “art
speak” (unless, heaven forfend,
they were serious ?), it was of course
the March Hare, not the Hatter,
who said, “Suppose we change the
subject. ”

- M -

The more important question,
perhaps, is whether Lewis Carroll
himself suffered from mercury
poisoning. He was, without
question, exposed to mercury in
the course of his photography ...
Mary Hammond, The Mad
Hatter: The Role of Mercury in
the Life of Lewis Carroll, 2014.
Actually, there is a small question:
the wet collodion process does not in
any way involve mercury.

- m -

The pamphlet “Three Letters on
Ant-Vaccination” . . .

Eugene Seneta, “Lewis Carroll,
Boole’s Inequality and Statistical
Inference, ” The Carrollian no.

30, 2017

- m -

{Carroll’s] aggressive joke played
on the idea that Xie might be
growing fast enough to suffer the
fate Alice is threatened with by the
Red Queen: “Off with her head!”

and, in the same chapter,

There is the same pun on fit”:
the poem is An Agony in Eight Fits,
just as in Wonderland the King of
Hearts quotes the line before she
had this fit, then asks Alice if she
ever has fits.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The
Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll
and the Secret History of
Wonderland, Harvil Seeker,
London, 2015

- m -

A simple translation of Jonathan
Swift’s famous novel, Alice in Won¬
derland [cover]; novel by Levis
Carrol [© page].

Hindi adaptation (“Magic World”)
first published by Shiksha Bharati
in 1958 and frequently reprinted

mgs

fa ^ nlTlng De s\

OF STEPHANIE LOVETT

P erhaps the most intellectually fascinating

and personally gratifying things about being
interested in Lewis Carroll and involved in
the LCSNA are connections—making them, seeing
them made, following them as they cascade, seeing
what new things they bring into being.

There can’t be many LCSNA members who
haven’t taken step after step from their initial reason
for being interested in the life or
works of Lewis Carroll into new
activities and pursuits. How many
of us started with an intuition
about Alice and Carroll (as Alice
says, “Somehow it seems to fill
my head with ideas—only I don’t
exactly know what they are!”) and
now draw connections among
Christina Rossetti, Bram Stoker,

Tristan da Cunha, vivisection, John Lennon, tennis
tournaments, railways, Shakespeare, ciphers, bathing
machines, and eternal damnation?

Although I often think of this amazing post¬
modern network of interconnections as a defining
quality of Lewis Carroll, it is actually on my mind now
because I’m just back from the fall LCSNA meeting
at the Morris Library of the University of Delaware
at Newark, where we were hosted by scholar and
collector Mark Samuels Lasner. I could say this of
every meeting, but this one seemed to be particularly
overflowing with connections, both academic and
personal.

Perhaps you’ve already read the meeting summa¬
ry and noticed this, too. We were so fortunate to have
ideas and information crackling around the room,
as each speaker brought forward things that sparked
and connected with members of the audience and
other speakers. Dana Richards’s descriptions of
Martin Gardner’s role in launching the modern
skepticism movement brought forth cheers from
an audience member deeply involved in that cause,
and more cheers erupted from other—Sherlock-
ian—audience members when Dana and Martin’s
enthusiasm for Holmes came up. August Imholtz and
Mark Samuels Lasner both drew lines, some direct
and some more wander-y, between the hand of Lewis

Carroll and where we were sitting right at that mo¬
ment. Edna Runnells Ranck’s connections between
Gertrude Stein and Lewis Carroll set up a launchpad
for the speaker following her, Sarah Boxer, who
included Alice B. Toklas among the many Alices she
proposed as embodying a number of commonalities
that connect them into an Alice paradigm. Among
Sarah’s Alices were four who feature in the work of
audience member Beverly Pittman,
who saw new connections there for
V her. Victor Fet’s work with Russian

and Siberian Alices not only made
worldwide connections for Alice
and us, but also for himself: At the
morning break, he discovered that
among the books for sale brought
by Matt and Wendy Crandall was
the edition of Alice that he had had
as a child and—despite his extensive research into
Russian Alices —had not seen since!

I and the LCSNA in general hope that many
of you who have enjoyed meetings in the past, and
many who have planned to come but haven’t found
the right one, will all mark your calendars now
for the weekend of April 13 and 14. We will be in
Los Angeles, hosted by the University of Southern
California and Linda and George Cassady,
and will be privileged to be there on
the occasion of their fabulous Won¬
derland Awards (see page
18). There will
be a number
of remarkable
events and speak¬
ers, and more
information will
follow, but do
make your plans and
put in now for a
personal day from
work—the main
event will be on a
Friday this time.

ALL MUST HAVE PRIZES

MATT CRANDALL

tributed by National Screen Ser¬
vice, an independent distribution
company that managed all movie
promotional material for all the
major studios from 1940 through
the early 1980s, ultimately clos¬
ing its doors forever in 2000.

NSS brought order to the movie
promotion world by instituting
a numbering system that identi¬
fied all films uniquely. This num¬
ber consisted of a two-digit code
representing the year, followed
by a 1- to 4-digit code represent¬
ing the film’s release spot in that
year. For instance, Walt Disney’s
Alice in Wonderland bears an NSS
number of 51/408, meaning that
the film was released in 1951, and
was the 408th film to have mate¬
rial released by NSS that year.

Many people confuse these NSS
numbers with the modern-day
concept of the dreaded “limited
edition number,” but it is just an
identification number.

Because NSS controlled the
creation and distribution of promotional material,
they were able to standardize the types of material
available. And since movies were released nationwide
over a period of weeks or months, the posters would
(theoretically) be returned to NSS and then sent to
other theaters for use. After the company’s demise,
all promotional material production and distribution
reverted to the individual studios, the variety of ma¬
terial was essentially reduced to a single poster, and
posters were single-use. The reason movie posters ex¬
ist in the collector’s market is twofold: Theater own¬
ers kept the material rather than return it to the NSS
exchange, and exchanges themselves closed up shop
and sold off their contents. Thank goodness, other¬
wise we wouldn’t have all those wonderful posters.

•Walt Disney's

Alice

in WONDERLAND

The all-cartoon Musical Wonderfilm!

Color by TECHNICOLOR

STARING the VOCES Of

Figure 1 NSS one sheet

the standard movie poster, the
only original size that still exists
today. Called a one-sheet, it is
27 "x 41" in size, and was folded
into eighths (Figure 1). The pa¬
per used in these vintage posters
was essentially newsprint, which
has a high acid content, so they
tend not to age very well. It is
common for collectors to have
them professionally mounted to
linen, both to conserve the post¬
er and to restore any damage.
This process can also remove the
fold lines, thus providing a much
more attractive image when the
poster is framed. The practice of
linen-mounting and restoration
does not diminish the value of
the poster in the majority of cas¬
es, and in fact usually enhances
it.

The next size up is called
a three-sheet, and is essentially
three one-sheets in size, measur¬
ing 41 M x81". Interestingly, this
poster looks almost exactly like
the one-sheet, using the same art, and only changing
the color of the words. There is an additional illustra¬
tive element at the bottom of the poster, several por¬
traits of the characters. The main art is also slightly
larger, affording a full rendition of the Cheshire Cat.
This poster was issued folded as well, but it was divided
into two pieces, so that it had to be properly aligned
when posted in order to present a full image. This sep¬
aration is right through the middle of the word “Alice”
in the film’s title. Again, linen-mounting can usually
hide all evidence of the junction of the two pieces.

The next size is the six-sheet, which, as you
might expect, is the size of six one-sheets, measur¬
ing 81"x81 M . This is the only poster that is precisely
square, albeit a very large square. Since they were so

I TU CKirjrfjr STQHUIC KOUOWHf ..Th» Qt*s*r» Clt

large, these posters were typically displayed on the
outside of theater buildings. Again, folded, six-sheets
usually came in four pieces, and sometimes the reg¬
istration of the individual pieces is a little off. A tal¬
ented restorer can usually resolve most of these issues
during the mounting process.

The last of the newsprint posters is the 24-sheet,
a billboard. These are extremely rare, and I am un¬
aware of any copies in private collections. Fellow Car-
rollian Byron Sewell owned one in the 1980s, and it is
now in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of
Texas at Austin—guess I’ll have to visit there someday
to see if I can get a photo of it. Fortunately, there is a
black-and-white image on the back of the campaign
book (press-related materials sent by movie studios
to theaters and movie distributors) and an advertise¬
ment for a billboard company that utilizes an image
of it, so we at least know what it looks like.

The remainder of the posters issued by NSS are
on a heavier paper stock, more of a card stock. The
first size of these is the lobby card, H M xl4 M in size.
This is just about 1/16 the size of a one-sheet. Usually
issued in a set of eight, lobby cards consist of a scene
from the film with some additional text that usually
lists the title and stars of the film (Figure 2). Many
films have a title card in the set, but Alice does not; it
has eight scene cards. Oddly, the lobby cards have an
unusual color scheme, with Alice’s dress being red,
and with many other character’s colors replaced as
well. They look strange, but are certainly easy to iden¬
tify.

The next size is called a half-sheet, with dimen¬
sions of 22"x28". You guessed it, they are about half
the size of a one-sheet, equal to four lobby cards. Alice ,
like many films of the day, had multiple styles of half¬
sheets, creatively labeled Style A (Figure 3) and Style
B. Both styles exhibit the same odd color scheme of

the lobby cards. Style A reuses the art from the six-
sheet, but with a light blue background. Style B reuses
the art from the 24-sheet. Both were issued rolled (or
rather unfolded), but theater owners would often
fold them when returning them to NSS.

Next up is the insert. I’m not really sure why these
posters are called inserts, but they are vertical and
narrow, measuring 14"x36 M . They were issued both
folded and flat, but it is rare to find them unfolded
because of their inconvenient aspect ratio. The art on
the Alice insert is very strange: It has the same image
as the three-sheet, and with the same oddly reversed
color scheme as on all the other card-stock posters,
but it only occupies a fraction of the poster, the rest
being taken up by verbiage. The colors as also very
muted; I’m not sure if that is by design or if all copies
seen to date are just faded.

Next is the window card, perhaps the most un¬
usual of the standard posters in the set. Window cards
were designed to be displayed in windows of local
businesses, to advertise the film at the local theater.
Consequently, there is a large white area at the top
of the poster, where the theater would either custom-
print or hand-write the date, time, and location of
the movie show. It is rare to find window cards un¬
used; nearly all have this information written at the
top. The Alice card is particularly odd in that the art
is monochromatic blue, with simple yellow bands on
the sides and the text in red and blue. Not very attrac¬
tive, in my opinion.

The posters that survived are very rare, and lim¬
ited in production. Not all films had these posters,
and it is possible that the examples here are the only
known copies.

NSS issued a large paper banner on the same
card stock as the large posters above, with dimensions
of 25”x82”. The colors on this poster are very strange:

Figure 2 Lobby cards

'£)£l/6# r

IN ITS
W'ONOV-R-

\VOW')

,/***«•
and rknllsl

m Walt Disney’s

Mice

WONDERLAND

The all-cartoon Musical Wonderfilm!

TECHNICOLOR

Figure 3 Half sheet

blue, yellow, and green. It is the most common of
these rare posters. I’ve seen at least three copies over
the years.

They also issued a smaller paper banner, measur¬
ing 5 M x28" with an extremely limited color scheme of
essentially black and yellow. It is unknown how many
of these were issued. This is not a standard size, and
I’ve not seen any others like it for any other movie.

The next size is a standard size, although quite
rare for any title. This poster does not have a name,
it is simply referred to by its size: 40"x60". Again, on
the same heavy card stock, this poster is probably the
rarest of the standard sizes (other than the 24-sheet),
and there is to my knowledge only one known copy—
this one. The art is unique to this poster, although it
does resemble the art on some foreign posters. There
is a smaller companion to the poster in the standard-
size set, called a 30x40.1 have not seen an Alice in this
size, but knowledgeable poster professionals tell me
that if a 40x60 was made, a 30x40 was almost certainly
made. We’ll have to see if one turns up someday.

The last of the posters is not really a poster—it is
a standee (Figure 4). Standees are still made to this
day, and in fact have become quite elaborate for many
of the summer-blockbuster type films. But in the old
days, standees were typically a variation of one of the
standard poster styles, rendered as a three-dimension¬
al cardboard display. Vintage standees are exception¬
ally rare. Very few survived, as they were at the mercy
of the theater-going public. Whereas the posters were
usually behind glass or up on a wall at least, standees
were on the ground and able to be molested by many
grubby hands.

There are a few more pieces of promotional ma¬
terial on Alice. The first is the herald, a single sheet
of paper folded like a small program. It features art

on the cover—in this case the same art as on the six-
sheet, but reversed—and details of the film inside,
with the name of the theater usually printed on the
back. Theaters typically ordered lots of these to hand
out to customers, enticing them to come back for the
next exciting feature film. I don’t know why, but this
herald is the only one I’ve ever seen. I would expect
the herald to be very common, easy to collect at the
time and not a burden to store. But for whatever rea¬
son, it is very, very rare.

Another rare piece of promotional material is
the theater slide. This is a glass slide that the theater
projected on the screen either between showings or
during intermissions, to advertise upcoming films. I
didn’t even know that these slides were produced after
the 1930s and 1940s, but lo and behold, here one is!

Finally there is the wide world of 8x10 still pho¬
tographs. There are probably over 300 different still
photographs from the original release of Alice , each
with a negative number printed in the image. Num¬
bers run from at least A-l to A-341, so that’s a lot of
stills. However, there is one set that stands out: the
Color-Glos. These are listed in the campaign book
as a set of ten hand-tinted stills, and they exhibit the
same weird color scheme as the lobby cards and a few
other posters. There is also something about the pro¬
cess used to make these that renders them extremely
brittle. A great many of them turn up with significant
tears or chips in the margins. It is indeed rare to find
a complete set in excellent condition.

So that wraps it up for domestic movie paper for
Disney’s original release of Alice. Stay tuned for future
articles on the even larger topic of foreign movie posters.

Arcane Illustrators:
Goranka Vrus Murtic

MARK BURSTEIN

y dear friend Professor Mark Stoll was
once again on his way to an academic
conference, this time in Zagreb. (The
twisted tale of his finding a very rare copy of Teresa Li¬
ma’s illustrated Alice in Portugal is told in KL 93:31.)
He asked me for a list of my holdings in Bosnian,
Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin so as not to buy
anything I already had. Mark diligently scoured a
half-dozen Antikvariat (used book stores) and found
two books I was lacking, both in Croatian: a combined
Wonderland/Looking-Glass (Alice u zemlji cudesa / Iza
zrcala i sto je Alice tamo zatekla ) published by Edicije
Bozicevic in 2016, translated by Borivoj Radakovic
and illustrated by Antonija Marinic (ISBN 978-953-
7953-47-8), and a rarity, a Looking-Glass (Alica s onu
stranu ogledala) translated by Mira Buljan and Ivan V.
Lalic (verses) published in 1962 by Mladost—the first
translation of that book into Croatian. It was illustrat¬
ed in a minimalist yet stylized way by Goranka Vrus
Murtic, somewhat reminiscent of those by Franciszka
Themerson, a Polish-born artist whose 1946 Looking-
Glass was published in 2001 by Inky Parrot, or Wal¬
ter Anderson’s Alice (University Press of Mississippi,
1983). “The friendly person at the Zagreb Antikvariat
mentioned that Ms. Murtic’s husband was also a fa¬
mous artist,” Mark told me.

Goranka Vrus was born on February 22, 1937, in
Velika Gorica, in what was then the Kingdom of Yugo¬
slavia. Her art always came first, but she did make a
side venture into the cinema, as a pretty actress whose
sole credit seems to be Opsada [The Siege, 1956], a
black-and-white film in the Serbo-Croatian language
in which she played the lead character, Nevenka. That
same year she married the artist Edo Murtic, and they
were together until his death in 2005.

Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts ( Aka-
demija likovnih umjetnosti) at the University of Zagreb
in 1960, she had a long, prolific career, working in
oils, enamel, tapestry, and costume design. She has
had many exhibitions and catalogs of her fine ab¬
stract art, but I can find no mention of any other book
she illustrated.

Her husband, Edo Murtic, was one of the most
significant and honored abstract artists in the social¬
ist world. Born on May 4, 1921, in Bjelovar, Croatia
(then in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes),
he was best known for his lyrical abstraction and ab¬
stract expressionist styles. He also attended the Acad¬
emy of Fine Arts, but it’s hardly likely he met Goranka
there, as she was two at the time. (They met at Krsto
Hegedusic’s master workshop in the mid-1950s.) Edo
worked in a variety of media, including oil painting,
gouache, graphic design, ceramics, mosaics, murals,
and set design. Over 1,500 of his works were donated
by his family to the City of Zagreb in 2010.

, Vo&e-,'A a. Vo&e.‘/y a\Aos.&

GOETZ KLUGE

Figure 1 Henry Holiday illustration for Lewis Carroll’s
The Hunting of the Snark

H enry Holiday's illustration for Lewis Car-
roll’s The Hunting of the Snark shown in Fig¬
ure 1 indicates that the Banker didn’t feel
too well after his encounter with the Bandersnatch.
Holiday faithfully put into artistic form what Carroll
wrote:

He was black in the face, and they scarcely
could trace

The least likeness to what he had been:

While so great was his fright that his waistcoat
turned white—

A wonderful thing to be seen!

Carroll’s Snark ballad was published in 1876. In
1872, Edward Lear wrote this limerick:

There was an old man of Port Grigor,

Whose actions were noted for vigour;

He stood on his head
till his waistcoat turned red,

That eclectic old man of Port Grigor.

Did Carroll allude to Lear’s waistcoat poetry in
Snark ? That would be a textual allusion. Could there
be pictorial allusions as well?

Figure 2a shows a close-up of the Banker’s head.
Figure 2b depicts (after slight horizontal compres¬

sion) The Imagebrakers (c. 1567), an etching by Mar¬
cus Gheeraerts the Elder. It has some surprising re¬
semblances to Holiday’s illustration: note the similar
mouths and right eyes. Other details match well, too,
but the noses do not—or at least not at first glance.
But take the nose (highlighted by the rectangle in
Figure 2b) and invert it, and you’ll get Figure 2c,
which more closely matches the Banker's face. If Holi¬
day did indeed use the etching as his inspiration, he
perhaps gave one of the Banker's nostrils an almost
rectangular shape because he found that shape in the
inverted nose from Gheeraerts' etching as well.

I first made this comparison in 2009. It was
among the findings that prompted my “Snark hunt”
a couple of years ago. Does it really show that Holiday
had been influenced by Gheeraerts’s print? Or was
my finding an illusion? It’s a matter of opinion, and
there’s no evidence to decide whether Holiday was
indeed alluding to Gheeraerts’s print. There prob¬
ably never will be any clear evidence. Thus, this is the
place for us to decide. As Heinz von Foerster once
said, “Only those questions that are in principle un-
decidable, we can decide” (von Foerster: “Ethics and
Second-Order Cybernetics,” Systeme et therapie famil-
iale , Paris, 1990).

There are indeed other possible inspirational
sources for Holiday’s image. I first found William
Sidney Mount’s painting The Bone Player (1856) on
Mahendra Singh’s blog. Figure 3 shows a mirror im¬
age of the painting, which bears many resemblances
to the Banker image. Note the similar poses and the
bones in their hands held in nearly identical posi¬
tions. Henry Holiday and Lewis Carroll may well have
seen this painting in London in 1875 when Goupil

& Cie promoted lithographic reproductions by Jean-
Bap tiste Adolphe Lafosse.

There is a possible third source, involving the Bell¬
man’s arm: a Benjamin Duchenne photo taken in or
before 1868 and used in Charles Darwin’s The Expression
of Emotions in Man and Animals. It is shown in Figure 4,
and it might have inspired Henry Holiday as well. For
more information, visit http://kl.snr.de in my blog.

Figure 2a Detail of the Banker’s face

Figure 2b The Imagebreakers, Figure 2c The Imagebreakers

a 1567 etching by Marcus with the nose inverted

Gheeraerts (the nose is
highlighted in white)

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Figure 3 The Bone Player, an 1856
painting by William Sidney Mount

Figure 4 Benjamin Duchenne photograph
used in Darwin’s The Expression
of Emotions in Man and Animals

3n Jfflemoriam

- ► >^»(<< «<-

Morton N. Cohen
27 February 1921 — 12 June 2017

Remembered by Edward Guiliano

Collage by Alan Tannenbaum;
photo of Morton Cohen taken from
an “assisted self portrait” by Kazuhiro Yoshimoto

T here’s a belief the act of reading is a
dialogue between two minds via the
printed page. By that definition, any¬
one studying the life and works of Lewis Carroll
over the past 50 years has likely engaged in a
conversation with the late Morton Cohen, edi¬
tor of Carroll’s letters, Carroll’s biographer of
record, and author of many essays and books on
or relating to Lewis Carroll. For those privileged
to know him, his published words live on in his
voice—with its rounded genteel tones, slight
high pitch, and pronunciation affected by his
years researching in England, as well as by his
time in the halls of American academia, where
he professed Victorian literature.

While he passed away in New York City on
June 12, 2017, at age 96, there is a notion that a
person dies when the last person on earth who
knew that person and thinks about that person
dies. So Morton will live on, not only in the many
people of all ages he touched, but in his many
published words. He was a gifted, eloquent writ¬
er, a careful stylist who made it look easy. He was
just as careful a researcher, which is why we trust
his words. And his works will bear the test of time.
He was 39 years old in 1962 when—after do¬
ing work on both Ryder Haggard and Rudyard
Kipling—he took up Carroll as his research
focus, upon the invitation of Roger Lancelyn
Green to edit Carroll’s letters with him. The
first of those edited letters appeared in 1979.

In 1962, Carroll was not accepted as a ma¬
jor author in the canon of British or world lit¬
erature, and children’s literature was not yet a
genre thought worthy of study. It was a coura¬
geous thing to champion Carroll for someone
building an academic career in the publish-or-
perish, complex world of American research
universities during their period of rapid devel¬
opment. Carroll wasn’t Dickens or Browning
or Tennyson or the Bronte sisters. He wasn’t
serious. But at a time when American scholars
in particular primed the publishing pump with
editions of primary letters and biographies,
Morton N. Cohen staked out Lewis Carroll as
his main subject.

For a Columbia University Ph.D., that was
bold. It turned out well for sure, as Carroll has
more than eclipsed many of the once most
esteemed Victorians, and Morton’s work has
benefited a generation and more of scholars.
He was a primary researcher and writer, not a
critic. He did not have patience for the criti¬
cal theories that ruled English departments of
the 1970s, ’80s, even ’90s. He was an old-school
gentleman who wanted to let the literature and
the facts tell the story. And he loved the humor
in the Alice books.

He lived an extraordinary life—the stuff of
the America dream. Born on a farm in Calgary,
Canada, he moved to Montreal with his Jewish
parents, Samuel and Zelda Cohen, then to the

Boston area with his family, and eventually to
Manhattan for much of his adult life. It was in
Montreal that his elder sister, Ilene, presented
him with a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonder¬
land on one of her regular Friday night visits.

For decades he “triangulated,” as he called
it, following the academic calendar in New York,
then spending summers at a home in London,
and as many winter breaks as he could manage
in his apartment in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He
wrote everywhere. An early adopter of word pro¬
cessing, he carried his suitcase-like Kaypro “por¬
table” computer and his many hies with him.

In 1996, he was made a member of the Royal
Society of Literature in England. He could not
believe it, and considered his acceptance one of
his proudest moments. His appointment as a Fel¬
low of Christ Church, Oxford, as a learned col¬
league, also filled him with self-esteem.

Morton was something of a man of mystery,
traveling in different places and joining discrete
communities, many of which became adopted
homes and families—including the Lewis Car-
roll Society of North America, of which he was
a founding member in 1974. He was to remain
one of the Society’s strongest and most loyal
supporters for the rest of his life. He guarded
his research and his ideas until they saw their
way into print (yet was generous to those he re¬
spected and trusted). He was guarded overall,
a gay man at a time when being “out” meant
danger professionally and personally. He mys¬
teriously published profitable books under a
pseudonym he chose never to reveal. As “John
Moreton,” he wrote a series of children’s stories
and books starting in the mid-1960s (e.g., Funky:
Mouse for a Day, Putnam, 1965), and seemingly
some crime novels. Such undertakings would
have been frowned upon in the 1960s and 1970s
by his top-tier academic colleagues.

He rarely spoke about his military adven¬
tures during the Second World War. In 1943,
with three years of college behind him and not
yet an American citizen, he enlisted as a private
in the United States Army. As he recounted, he
ended up translating German and French into
English for Army leadership, notably in Germa¬
ny at the close of the conflict. He left the Army
in 1946 to return to Tufts University, where to¬
day he is remembered by the Morton N. Cohen
Creative Writing Award, which he endowed.

He also lives on through his endowment of the
Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished
Edition of Letters, which is administered by the
Modern Language Association of America.

The man who could not finally determine
from his research whether Carroll had blue
or gray eyes, had sparkling blue ones himself
and a ready chuckle. He was seemingly always
dressed in shirt and tie, whether entertaining in
his somewhat formal manner at his club in New
York, the Century Club, or lecturing undergrad¬
uates and eventually Ph.D. students, or attend¬
ing meetings of our Society. After he earned his
Ph.D. in the early 1950s, his academic career
took time to develop, including yeoman stops
on the faculties of West Virginia, Rutgers, and
Syracuse Universities—something he laughed a
bit about, not because they are not good uni¬
versities, but because they are so not Morton
Cohen, as he acknowledged with a charming
smile. In the early 1960s, he finally settled in at
City College of New York and eventually at the
Ph.D. Program in English at the CUNY Gradu¬
ate Center, where for a period he served as the
deputy director of the program up until his re¬
tirement in the mid-1990s.

Of special note is Morton’s belief in high-
quality research and scholarship and the need to
elevate Lewis Carroll to his rightful place in the
canon of Western literature. He raged against
the more sensational theories about Carroll
unsupported by any understanding of the facts
of his life or the period in which he lived. Mor¬
ton pushed the Lewis Carroll Society of North
America to make a leading and serious effort to
set the record straight. He surely did his part,
helping with the Society’s ambitious projects
and writing essays and books for its publications.
He gave legitimacy to the LCSNA, and it granted
him the greatest respect for his work.

Morton will be remembered for helping the
world understand Lewis Carroll as a man in the
flesh, whose moral compass was rock solid while
planted as much in early twentieth-century
values as in those of his own times. Thanks to
Morton’s careful efforts, Carroll is recognized
as a man of brilliance in many areas, of great wit
and charm, tremendous curiosity, a kind and
loving disposition, and now as a respected and
eminent Victorian.

MORE ON MORTON

Edward Guiliano’s 2012 interview
“Thirty Years Later” with Morton
can be found by visiting YouTube,
com and then searching for the
“LCSNA Media” channel.

Although Morton’s introduc¬
tions to various books and academ¬
ic articles are far too voluminous
to list, here is a partial bibliogra¬
phy of Carrollian books of which
he was the author, editor, or a
major contributor:

Lewis Carroll at Christ Church,
National Portrait Gallery, 1974

The Letters of Lewis Carroll,
Oxford, 1979 (with Roger
Lancelyn Green)

The Russian Journal II, LCSNA,
1979

Lewis Carroll and the Kitchins,
Argosy Bookstore, 1980

Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll,
Pantheon, 1982

Lewis Carroll and Alice 1832-
1982, The Pierpont Morgan
Library, 1982

Lewis Carroll and the House of
Macmillan, Cambridge, 1987
(with Anita Gandolfo)

Lewis Carroll, Photographer of
Children: Four Nude Studies,
Clarkson N. Potter/Crown,
1988

Lewis Carroll: Interviews and
Recollections, University of
Iowa, 1989

Lewis Carroll: A Biography, Mac¬
millan, 1995

Reflections in a Looking Glass: A
Centennial Celebration of Lewis
Carroll, Photographer, Aperture,
1998

Lewis Carroll and His Illustra¬
tors: Collaborations and
Correspondence, 1865-1898,
Cornell University Press, 2003
(with Edward Wakeling)

Alice in a World of Wonderlands,
Oak Knoll/LCSNA, 2015

Carrollian Notes

ALICE IN puzzleland:

THE JABBER WOCKY
PUZZLE PROJECT

Chris Morgan

I’m a puzzle geek, so of course
I flew to Paris last summer to at¬
tend the annual meeting of the
International Puzzle Party. The
IPP began nearly four decades
ago, and meets yearly in different
cities around the world, attracting
400 or more enthusiasts who col¬
lect Rubik’s Cubes and other types
of mechanical puzzles. We viewed
the latest puzzle designs in Paris
and swapped puzzles with friends.
(As it turns out, Paris also has
famous artwork and nice build¬
ings. Who knew?) Among our
regular attendees are New York

Times Puzzle Master Will Shortz
and IPP founder and international
puzzle expert Jerry Slocum, whose
collection of over 30,000 puzzles
is permanently housed at Indiana
University’s Lilly Library.

In the months leading up to
the conference, attendees began
seeing a series of online teaser
videos hinting at a special group
of puzzles called the “Jabberwocky
Project,” to be unveiled in Paris.

As we later found out, UK-based
puzzle designer and constructor
Steve Miller had gathered together
some of the world’s best puzzle de¬
signers and asked them to create a
set of puzzles with themes related
to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and Through the Looking-Glass, all
encased within a bigger puzzle.

Steve says “An international
group, including some of the top
puzzle designers and makers in
the world, have band(ersnatch)
ed together to form the Witzend
Puzzle Collective and create The
Jabberwocky Puzzle Project.” It is a
limited-edition set of large chests,
each containing the specially com¬
missioned puzzles; an impressive,
specially forged “Vorpal Sword”;
and a souvenir book. But you can’t
get to the puzzles until you open

The Jabberwocky Project's limited-edition puzzle chest, containing more
than a Baker's dozen of puzzles with Alice in Wonderland themes

the chest—itself a challenging
puzzle. These sets will most likely
sell at auction, and probably in the
five-figure range. There is no word
yet on whether any of the puzzles
will be sold individually.

The Vorpal Sword is pattern-
welded with 81 folded layers of
steel, and is secured in the lid of
the chest. Steve noted “It can only
be released once all the smaller
puzzle boxes and the puzzle lock
have been solved. The sword
can then be used to unlock the
remaining secrets of the chest.

The collection has been designed
to look like a contemporary Vic¬
torian campaign chest, made of
burr walnut with brass edging.

The brass and finish are clean, but
unpolished.” The White Rabbit
motif in the center of the lid, how¬
ever, is highly polished to a mirror
finish, hinting that following the
White Rabbit as Alice did will lead
to a magical Wonderland inside
the chest.

I got a chance to play with
some of the remarkable puzzle
creations—they’re definitely chal¬
lenging!

The puzzles have clever, some¬
times unexpected, connections
to the Alice books. Kelly Snache’s
“There Goes Bill,” for example,
has different designs on each face

related to the chimney from which
Bill the lizard emerges after being
kicked by Alice. (Its designs may
also provide clues to the solution
of the puzzle.) Simon Nightin¬
gale’s “The Mouse’s Tale” repro¬
duces the undulating vertical text
from the book. Peter Wiltshire’s
“Down the Rabbit Hole” has a
hole on one side, but it is partially
blocked. Would-be puzzle solvers
must get down the hole somehow
to solve the puzzle.

More information about the
Jabberwocky Puzzle Project, in¬
cluding videos and photographs,
can be found on the Witzend Puz¬
zle Collective’s Facebook page and
on YouTube.

The Cheshire Cat by Yoh Kakuda

There Goes Bill by Kelly Snache

Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee by Brian Young

CONTEMPORARY REVIEW OF
NABOKOV’S ANYA DISCOVERED

Victor Fet

The first—very brief, and very
negative—review of Nabokov’s
1923 translation of Wonderland ,

Ann e cmpane nydec {Anya v stran
udes ), was discovered in 2016
by researcher Galina Glushanok
(“An Unknown Review of V. Sirin’s
Translation of Alice in Wonderland ,”
Zvezda, 2016, 11: 214-220; in
Russian). There is no other known
writing about Nabokov’s Anya
until 1970 (“Anya in Wonderland:
Nabokov’s Russified Lewis
Carroll.” Simon Karlinsky. In:
Appel, A., Jr. 8c C. Newman, eds.
Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences,
Translations, and Tributes. Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 1970: 310-315)!

The original review was pub¬
lished in a Russian emigre journal,
PyccKan vuKOJia 3a pydewoM (Russ-
kaia shkola za rubezhom [The Rus¬
sian School Abroad]), in Prague
in 1924. The author of the review
was Dr. Evgenii Elachich (EBreHHH
AjieKcaitnpoBHH EjianuH, 1880-
1944), a zoologist who emigrated
in 1917 to Yugoslavia, after pub¬
lishing extensively in Russia about
polar fauna, birds, dinosaurs, and
the like, as well as children’s litera¬
ture. My translation follows.

L. Carroll. Anya in Wonderland.

Trans, from English by V. Sirin,
with ill. by S. A. Zalshupin
114 pp.

Ed. “Gamayun,”

Berlin, 1923

No matter what pedagogical criti¬
cism says, no matter what it states,
books like this one will still be
written, published, and presented
to children. Children will read this
nonsense, and parents will think
and argue that such reading “con¬
tributes to the development of
children’s imagination.” Conscious
of my complete frustration in
this respect, I still want to repeat
again and again the arguments,
which aren’t new. Carroll’s book
appeared in Russian translation a

long time ago, and even, I think,in
different translations and retell¬
ings. It is clearly designed for the
poor taste of parents and the in¬
discriminateness of child readers.

It is a fairy tale—but there is noth¬
ing poetic or heartfelt in it, which
would give an inherent charm to a
good fairy tale. This is a long set of
insipid and deliberately invented
(rather than artistically created),
exaggerated, unbelievable adven¬
tures and wonders. The wit lies in
the fact that the girl is constantly
changing in size, her neck is
stretched a few meters, then she
becomes very tiny, etc. Many chil¬
dren are very willing to read such,
for them, indisputable nonsense:
dancing lobsters with turtles, play¬
ing croquet as hedgehogs serve
as balls and flamingos [as mal¬
lets], etc., etc., but who needs it?

Is there at least any shadow of
benefit from reading such a non-
poetic nonsense? I doubt that, but
the harmfulness of such a book,
in my opinion, is certain. So, for
example, as the transformations
of the girl are described, she con¬
fuses everything and, recollecting
verses, recites:

Say, uncle, it’s not for nothing.
That you are considered
very old,

After all, really, your hair is gray,
And you have grown incredibly
fat. . . (page 42),
etc., and so on.

In another place another “poem”
is given:

Howl, my beautiful baby,

If you will sneeze, I will beat you,
You [are doing it] on purpose, it’s
clear . . .

Bye-bye . . . (page 53), etc.

These doubtfully clever remarks
are easily remembered, but is it
good?

Children are just beginning to
get acquainted with poetry; they
would need to be taught to feel
the beauty of Lermontov’s verse,
taught to love it. But here an ugly,
uneasy parody, a mockery, is intro¬
duced into the child’s head. And
again, some will refer to the fact
that “children are so willing to
read,” and seriously believe that
in this case this is an argument in
favor of this book. It still seems to
me that those parents and educa¬
tors who want to instill in children
a respect for the book from early
childhood, to develop in them
good taste, artistic flair, and love
for their native poetry, would have
to save their children from clog¬
ging their young brains with such
low-quality literature.

- m -

The Albanian Gheg, or Liza
in the Land of Wonders

Byron Sewell

On April 7, 1939, Benito Musso¬
lini’s troops invaded Albania and
quickly swept away most Albanian
resistance. Albania was immedi¬
ately annexed as part of the Italian
Kingdom. After their defeat, many
Albanian men of fighting age who
had survived the brief war fled
to the protection of the north¬
ern reaches of Albania near the
Kosovo border, hoping to eventu¬
ally fight as partisans and resist the
Italians invaders.

That same month, Albania’s
most prominent author, Margaret
Hasluck, author of Kendime Englist-
Shqip or Albanian-English Reader:
Sixteen Albanian Folk-stories, Collected
and Translated (Cambridge, 1931),
was ordered to leave Albania by
King Zog I for unknown reasons.
She fled to Athens and ended
up in the British Embassy in late
April, and because of her great
knowledge of the Albanian lan¬
guage, began work in organizing
the Albanian resistance movement.

One of the top priorities was to
set up a code book that could be
used by the partisans to communi¬
cate with the English. She finally
came up with the strange idea of
translating an innocent seeming
children’s story into the obscure
Albanian Gheg dialect, spoken
where most of the potential parti¬
san men had gone into hiding, for
use as the key to the code. Per¬
haps because of her early work in
Cambridge, she chose the unlikely
English novel Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland.

Since it would be impossible to
publish the novel in Albania (it
was now under occupation and
all printing presses were under
guard), it was published in Athens.
The publishing data was falsified
as: Hysejn Cela and Beqie Cela,
trans. Tenniel, illus. Liza ne Boten
e Qudinavet [Liza in the Land of
Wonders]. Tirane, Albania: Ismail
MaE Osmanaj, 1944. This was
accomplished in 1941 in a print
run of 500 copies. The falsified
1944 date was an unnoticed print¬
ing error made in the rush to get
it printed before the Germans
invaded Greece. Several British
agents were smuggled into Alba¬
nia through Kosovo, where they
contacted the partisans and in¬
formed them how to use the code
book (page number, line number,
and number of letters from the
right-hand side) that would be
air-dropped on a specific date and
at specific locations. Both agents
were captured by the Italians and
tortured, telling their inquisitors
that they were delivering copies
of Alice in Wonderland to Albanian
children who only spoke Gheg. No
one believed them, and they were
eventually shot.

The Italian occupation eventu¬
ally abandoned Albania and re¬
turned to Italy, at which point the
Germans occupied Albania. After
WWII was over, the communists
took over, and the country was ad¬
ministered by the communist and
atheist Enver Hoxha as prime min¬

ister. It was a long time of hard¬
ship for the Albanians, especially
in the north of the country, where
there were terrible shortages of
many things, including paper. The
result was that most copies of the
Gheg translation were destroyed,
being used for everything from
starting kitchen ovens, to wrap¬
ping freshly caught fish, to toilet
paper, and as a bad substitute for
cigarette paper.

By the 1960s, copies of the
Gheg translation had become
somewhat scarce, and by 2015 the
only known survivor was a copy
held in the rare book section of
one of the Albanian National Li¬
braries. However, over time other
copies eventually began to make
their way into the used book stores
in Tirane, and from there offered
for sale on eBay. Two copies, both
in absolutely horrible condition,
were snapped up by a couple of
insatiable American Carrollians.
The best preserved of the two
wound up in The Alan and Alison
Tannenbaum Collection, and the
other (missing the first 15 pages,
including the title page) in The
Victoria J. Sewell Lewis Carroll
Collection.

Albanian Sayings
of Carrollian Interest

Burri eshte koka, kurse gruja eshte
qafa.

The man is the head and the
woman is the neck.

Ju mund te ndani nje shtrat me dike,
por nuk mund te enderroni te njejtat
endrra.

You can share a bed with some¬
one, but you cannot dream the
same dreams.

Kur te vije Revolucioni, ne do te bejme
plehrat e kodrave te hirit te Wonder¬
land me kockat e Zemrave, sepse ne
Wonderlanders kane vuajtur shume
per te harruar!”

When the Revolution comes, we
will manure the croquet lawns
of Wonderland with the bones
of Hearts, for we Wonderlanders
have suffered too much to forget!

The Tannebaum copy

The first two are famous proverbs;
the last is a parody of a saying of Isa
Boletini (1864-1916), a Kosovo Al¬
banian nationalist figure and guer¬
rilla fighter in the Ottoman Kosovo
Vilayet, spoken in 1913: “When
the spring comes, we will manure
the plains of Kosovo with bones of
Serbs, for we Albanians have suf¬
fered too much to forget.”

[This le Carre-ish piece is, of course, a
parody by Mr. Sewell and none of it is
to be taken literally. -Ed.]

- m -

Alice and the Graceful White Rabbit
John Langdon
2017

Robert Stek

If you are (as I am) a lover of
Wonderland (and you wouldn’t be
reading this if you weren’t!); if you
are a boomer (as I am) who grew
up with the pop songs of the ’50s,
’60s, and beyond; if you are a lover
of wordplay (as I am), whether it
makes you laugh or cringe; if your
brain automatically absorbed news
and popular culture (as mine did)
of events from the ’50s onward,
then welcome to the club of Car¬
rollians who will find Alice and the
Graceful White Rabbit, a punderful
adaptation that goes from mad to
verse, to be just their cup of tea. I
mean, slick puns begin in the title.

To even begin to give you the
flavor of the writing, there will be
spoilers ahead. Most of the joy I
had in reading this book came
from discovering the clues in not
only the text, but also in its pre¬
sentation. (That last claws was a
clue, as you will discover when you
open to the very first page.)

There have been many Won¬
derland pastiches over the years,
sum bitter than otters. This is not
a child’s book: it is for groan-ups
who will automagically make the
free associations necessary to truly
cherish this type of writing. One
distinguishing characteristic of
Langdon’s AGWR (if I may be so
bold) is his mostly (as Mary Ann
would say) faithfull retelling of
Alice’s adventures, chapter by
chapter, event by event, step by
step. Slowly I turned each page
because heartily a paragraph
went by without a reference to a
song, musical group, person, or
event in a paronomasiacal man¬
ner. However, it would be an era
to think we were Victorian—no,
this is a thoroughly modern Alice
who doesn’t take a magic bus to
Wonderland. From the very first
chapter she begins “Subterranean,
Homesick, and a Little Blue,” tum¬
bling down a hole like her Carrol-
lian namesake. And she also passes
a bookshelf on the way:

One was entitled, “The Book of
Love.” She wondered who had
written it, but the author’s name
was not on the spine. Next to it
there was a first edition copy of
“Just Dropped In.” Alice thought
that was quite appropriate.

Down, down, down. Down
without pity. Would this down¬
ward journey never come to
an end?

Langdon is very respectful of the
original story, as he states explicitly
in this parity:

How does the little linguaphile
Refresh a classic tale.

And vex the purists all the while
On a stupendous scale.

How cheerfully he drops a pun
in a dependent clause
and does it merely ’cause it’s fun
regardless of its flaws.

How blithely he’ll ignore the
rules

Of grammar and of diction.

But no! He never ridicules
A classic work of fiction.

Although there are over 700
songs and musical groups refer¬
enced in this 170-page love child,
otter authors and events find their
plaice in the narrative. For exam¬
ple, only one with a sole so dead
wouldn’t be grateful for a tip of
the pen to my other fruity passion:

“Wait—he looks like the dog
from down the street—the
Baskervilles’ dog! It’s Arthur! I
always thought he was so small!”
thought Alice, then said out loud,
“They sure don’t lock you up like
they should. Home’s the place
for you. . . .Now what have you
got on your face? It looks like the
remains of an ice cream cone . . .
and oil!”

You might want to say that last
sentence out loud—jus’ sayin’. In
fact, the book bares rereading, as
each time one does, new things
jump out at one.

Buy now, you Knight Letter read¬
ers are ether knocked out by this
review, so that purchasing the
book is a fet accompli because
you know that you will lovett, or
you may even have a good acher
and feel the knead for a massage,
a beer and balm before you con¬
sider a purchase. Remember Lang¬
don does keep green the memory
of the master, as the writing is
burstein with a playfulness that
Carroll himself would appreciate.
Even if you feel you have to hide
your copy from these eyes (which
see well—can you guess who?), go
ahead and nuhn will ever no.

You can order a signed copy
for $20 by emailing him directly
at wordplay@JohnLangdon.net,
though by the time you read this
he may have it available at www.

JohnLangdon.net. And do wonder
about in John’s web sight: he is
an artist, designer, and writer who
created the ambigrams for Dan
Brown’s Angels & Demons, and is
the namesake for Brown’s sym-
bologist, Robert Langdon!

All kidding aside, ewe know you
want it.

>gj£

Alice’s Adventures
in Punch 1864-1950
Cheshire Cat Press, 2017

Andrew Ogus

When leafing through copies of
Punch magazine previous to 1864,
I’m always fascinated to see im¬
ages that might have lodged in
Carroll’s memory, to be later rein¬
terpreted in the Alice books. This
delightful volume contains images
from the other side of that mirror,
those inspired by Carroll himself.
Although the once burning social
issues that inspired them have
long since fallen on the ash heap
of history, the humor of recogni¬
tion—if not the exact reference—
remains.

Discounting the proto-Alice
of 1864 (KL 86: cover), the first
direct visual allusion to Carroll
in Punch appeared on March 16,
1872. Eight years after Wonderland,
and the same year as Looking-
Glass, Alice had already spread far
enough through the culture to
enter the visual shorthand of the
political cartoon.

John Tenniel was not above
caricaturing his own imagery,
sometimes placing real-life people
into his imagined postures. Later
artists did the same, or simply
dressed their subjects in familiar
costumes, sometimes acknowledg¬
ing their debt by including Ten-
niel’s monogram preceded by a
discreet “after.” The name of that
far-off country was easily reinter¬
preted as Blunderland, Thunder-
land, or Bumbleland.

Encountering familiar charac¬
ters with unfamiliar faces in the
Foreword gives a thrilling shock.
Alice, the quintessential British

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heroine, appears as Peace itself and
as the British voter. She and Britan¬
nia trade places and identities, with
Alice sometimes borrowing Britan¬
nia’s traditional helmet. Ernest
Shepard, the original illustrator of
the Winnie-the-Pooh books and a
long-time successor to Tenniel as a
Punch artist, drew from both Won¬
derland and Looking-Glass.

This luxurious Canadian pro¬
duction, designed and printed
by George Walker and Andy Mal¬
colm, is letterpress-printed on
Rives Lightweight buff, a 100% rag
paper, and comes in an elegant
green and gold box in a limited
edition of 42 copies ($389; con¬
tact CheshireCatPress@gmail.
com). The images are beautifully
reproduced from the original
magazines. Let us hope for a more
widely available trade version.

- m -

Alice’s Adventures under
the Land of Enchantment
Byron W. Sewell
Boojum Run Press, 2017
ISBN 978-1548615024

Cindy Watter

Yet another Alice tale has sprung
from the fertile brain of Byron W.
Sewell, author, artist, collector, and
polymath. In Alice’s Adventure under
the Land of Enchantment, Alice lives
in a New Mexico of a few decades
past. (“Land of Enchantment” is

New Mexico’s nickname.) Alice is
not the comfortably upper-class
child (by American standards)
who lives at the Deanery, but a
little girl from rural America at the
end of the Great Depression.

The dream frame anchors
the story. Alice Christian wakes
up early on Christmas day. (One
of her presents is a copy of The
Adventures of Alice in Wonderland
and The Thrilling Story of an Indian
Boy —a rare book today.) Instead
of raspberry tart, bread and butter,
or treacle, she has a hearty Christ¬
mas morn repast of biscuits, gravy,
bacon, and the orange that was
in her stocking. A rabbit leads her
down to the cellar, and the Land of
Enchantment adventure is launched.

Many of the incidents parallel
those in Wonderland—and yet
they are different. In Carroll’s
work, it is Alice who is the most
alarming creature of the Caucus-
Race, with her stories of the blood¬
thirsty Dinah. Land of Enchantment
features animals that like to eat
other animals: In fact, at one
point Alice and a rat are paddling
in the Pool of Tears, trying to stay
ahead of a rattler. (Brave Alice
later dispatches the rattlesnake
with a well-aimed rock.) At one
point she wonders if the rat is
Spanish, “come up from Mexico
with Cortez.” All of the animals
are indigenous to New Mexico—
skink, roadrunner, quail, prairie
dog, and so forth. Alice has the
wet creatures dry themselves by
sunning on a rock “like reptiles,
which in fact a goodly number of
them happened to be.”

Later in the book, when she
is in a boat with Charlie—a fish¬
erman who likes to take photo¬
graphs—they very tenderly rescue
the frightened prairie dog, which
had earlier swum away to escape
the diamond-backed rattler. Char¬
lie acts as the link to the second
part of the book, where he intro¬
duces Alice to a bruja (sorceress),
who has a remarkable cat. Chaos
ensues, with a jackalope, a horny

toad, a billy goat (who prefers to
be called Billy the Kid and is just a
little trigger-happy) adding to the
frolic. Later the party is invaded
by a horde of travelers from Texas,
who are on perhaps the worst
package tour in literature.

There are several Carrollian
in-jokes, including a criticism of
the often loathed Sylvie and Bruno.
Alice allows that the poems are en¬
tertaining, especially the ones with
the buffalo and hippo. She draws
the line at romance, however:

“All the yucky lovey-dovey stuff be¬
tween Arthur and his girlfriend,
Lady Burial, makes you feel kind
of sick to your stomach,” Alice
said.

The Horny Toad nodded its
head like it understood exactly
what Alice was talking about. “Do
you remember the pitchers of
her in the book?”

Alice thought for a moment.
‘Yes. Now that I think about it,
she usually looked kinda miser¬
able.”

“Exactly!” said H.T.

(Land of Enchantment Mice speaks
in her vernacular; there are no lady¬
like eruptions a la “How dreadfully
savage!” here.) Horny Toad and
Alice agree that perhaps Carroll
should have concluded Sylvie and
Bruno after the poetry, “The Pig-
Tale,” and “The Three Badgers”—
“while he was ahead.”

The pen-and-ink drawings by
Sewell are clever and charming.
Many of them are of animals, and
have a textbook-like precision.

The illustration of the Texan harri¬
dan who bullies her croquet team
over a cliff is on the cover, and it
is reminiscent of Dodgson’s own
drawing of the Queen of Hearts
in Under Ground —it has the same
angle and the same fearsome gaze.

The book contains a bonus: a
Victorian ghost story, written by
Byron Sewell and his wife, Victo¬
ria. It features a looking-glass and
might even frighten a reader who
is all alone on a dark night. The

illustrations are from the Sewells’
nineteenth-century photograph
collection.

Although Alice’s Adventure under
the Land of Enchantment is an imagi¬
nary work, it is based on the au¬
thor’s impressions of growing up
in the New Mexico of the Depres¬
sion and World War II in an age
of austerity. This book shares the
elegiac quality that distinguishes
the end of Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. It is a poignant mem¬
ory of an era that is long gone and
isn’t coming back.

Alice D.

Cath Lorina Dodgson
The Troy Bookmakers, 2017
ISBN 978-1-61468-403-9

Cindy Watter

Sometime during the fiftieth an¬
niversary of the Summer of Love,
this book appeared in my mailbox.
I studied its art nouveau design
cover, the illustrations, and the
assorted handmade messages
and illuminations on its pages,
and decided I needed to get into
the proper mood. I dug out the
patchouli, dropped my old vinyl
copy of “White Rabbit” onto the
turntable, and sent the children
out to score some weed, which
caused them to hoot mockingly,
“It’s legal now!” (Dear reader, I am
kidding about that last bit.) Truth
to tell, I was happy to be perfectly
compos mentis, as Alice D. (word¬
play on LSD, of course) requires
all one’s attention, not to mention
a copy of The Golden Bough , Edith
Hamilton’s Mythology , and an as¬
sortment of the works of Joseph
Campbell at hand. A basic famil¬
iarity with the signs of the zodiac
might be helpful, too. The author,
Kathleen O’Brien, has two degrees
in the classics, including a master’s
from Harvard, and it shows. Writ¬
ing under the pen name of Cath
Lorina Dodgson, she brings her
appreciation of Alice , knowledge of
myth, considerable humor, and a
truly remarkable talent with puns
to this prequel/homage/pastiche

of Alice’s Wonderland and Look¬
ing-Glass j ourneys.

Alice D. commences with a fram¬
ing technique: In this case, it is a
skating outing with Mr. Dodgson.
Instead of walking through a mir¬
ror, she falls through the ice, and
is launched on an adventure that
includes visiting Atlantis, battling
Medusa and her Gorgon sisters,
and going on trial for eating the
little oysters (spoiler alert: she
didn’t). To say AliceD. is densely
allusive is a zenith in understate¬
ment. On every page the reader
will trip over references to ancient
culture; fortunately, there is an
index. As for pop culture (the Dor¬
mouse does say “Feed your head”),
you are mostly on your own.

What holds the book together
is that the well-known Carrollian
characters behave in familiar ways.
Humpty Dumpty is verbose, the
Cook has a peppery temper, the
Red Queen is energetic, and the
White Queen is absentminded.
Layers of oddities begin to pile
up—the Sheep has a drunkard
husband (a Black Ram) and she
knits everything, including the
best tea Alice has ever enjoyed;
the Tweedles produce a child (a
baby Dodo, who disappears on
Pegasus). Their explanation for
this miracle is based on Plato and
the marriage habits of the an¬
cient Egyptians. Humpty Dumpty
is afraid of the Cook, for good
reason. At one point H-D is roller¬
skating, and he almost falls. The
Hatter immediately rushes out
with a frying pan, but is disap¬
pointed when his meal skates away,
merrily.

The puns and wordplay did
cause me to chortle and burble in
an undignified manner. Alice is
in danger of facing a “firing squid”
(actually an octopus), the necessity
for a “Karma Suture” is invoked,
and Father William declares that
his carnival act is “Minoan inven¬
tion.” The book of Time is pulled
from “Lewis’s carrel.”

The characters frequently dis¬
cuss the concept of time. Alice,

of course, feels urgent pressure
to prevent Medusa from doing
her worst—when characters get
“stoned” they can be on drugs,
pelted with rocks, or transformed
into stone—but there are many
other references. The conversation
between Father William and Alice
is practically Transcendentalist:

“We’re all preparing for a brand
new life.”

“You mean that’s what it’s like
to die?”

“No, no. We’re not dying now.
That comes later. We’re being
unborn. [. . .] Do you know why
babies don’t fear death like old
folk?”

“They’re too young to under¬
stand it.”

“Nonsense! It’s because a
baby is so much closer to its
previous life and hasn’t become
as attached to its body. Living
backwards for half of the year is a
great advantage to us. . . .” (135)

This is an eccentrically attractive
volume, with several color plates
of original art by the author as well
as a portrait of her attired as the
Red Queen.

By the time I finished the book,
I was sorry I hadn’t hung on to my
old copy of Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism.
Or Plato’s Symposium. Or the
Tibetan Book of the Dead. I repeat,
Alice D. is dense—but entertaining.
It is very funny on its own merits,
but Alice D. also fosters an even
greater appreciation of the rich¬
ness of the original and its ability
to endlessly inspire. Cath Lorina
Dodgson took several years—be¬
ginning in 1975—to write Alice
D., and it certainly has the aura
of another age. Today the 1960s
seem as remote as Carroll’s day, a
hundred years earlier. Alice D. is a
true period piece that is enjoyable
now.

You can pick up a copy from
Kath/Cath at the USC Spring
gathering; alicesfinalchapter.com;
thehippiecraticoath@gmail.com;
or (518) 703-2454.

-n-

Mad Hatters and March Hares
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Tor Books, 2017
ISBN 978-0765391063

Rose Owens

We’ve seen a passel of Alice-
themed short story collections roll
through these parts, and it can
be a daunting task to pick up the
next one in line. We always hope
that we’ll see something new, that
we’ll be surprised and astonished,
and that we won’t be falling asleep
mid-read as a result of the drudg¬
ery of poorly constructed rehash¬
ing. Fortunately, our stars are
not crossed with Mad Hatters and
March Hares , a charming and only
slightly uneven collection of tales
for our consumption. Editor Ellen
Datlow has done a splendid job of
knitting together these morsels of
story. They delight, surprise, and
challenge in a pleasing fashion.

These stories work best when
they feature characters other than
Alice herself. It’s refreshing to
find a retelling of this universe
via a mouthpiece other than the
titular girl. This is done captivat-
ingly well in the bulk of the book,
but especially so in the stories by
Jane Yolen, Richard Bowes, Jeffrey
Ford, Seanan McGuire, Andy Dun¬
can, and Katherine Vaz. Yolen’s
pieces (she graces us with a short
story and a poem) are both suc¬
cinct and evocative. “Conjoined”
gives us a brief window into the
life of a Barnum circus sideshow,
and draws together the fantasy of
“real”-world entertainment and the
mystery of Wonderland. It’s done
so sweetly, you’d think that Dodg-
son himself was guiding Yolen’s
hand. I was pleasantly surprised by
Duncan’s submission, which broke
the fourth wall by peeling back the
curtain on Sir John Tenniel’s letter
to Dodgson regarding that infa¬
mous “wasp chapter.” By evoking
a deeply paranoid and troubled
Tenniel in his pages, Duncan adds
some extra pizzazz to the man be¬
hind the artwork. I kept jumping

at the thought of a wasp creeping
behind me, mandibles bristling.

My favorite of the short stories
is the last one, “Moon, Memory,
and Muchness.” It is completely
different from anything I’ve read
in these kinds of collections. It
stands out for that reason and for
its unique connection to the world
of Wonderland. I won’t spoil the
plot, since the story comes with
many twists and turns that create a
satisfyingly bittersweet end to the
book (though we shouldn’t forget
the final word, Yolen’s haunt¬
ing poem, “Run, Rabbit, Run”).
Katherine Vaz tells her story from
a fresh angle, through the eyes
of the mother Alice left behind
(in so many words). We enter a
world of loss and sorrow, of using
Wonderland to cope with a most
tragic event. Avoiding the tempta¬
tion for preciousness or overdoing
allusions to Wonderland and its
inhabitants, Vaz instead combines
elements of crime procedurals,
“workaday” narratives, and an hon¬
est tale of coveting another’s life
and fortunes.

Beyond the stories listed above,
the collection stands up nicely. A
handful of the tales are well writ¬
ten but lose energy as they go on.
The lesson is, less is more: Don’t
be afraid to break away from the
siren song of Alice herself. Stay
down in front, and let the quiet
few (until now) muster up their
courage and break out in verse.
Their stories surprise and delight,
and keep our universe evolving.

- m -

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

The Classic Edition

Illustrated by Charles Santore
Cider Mill Press, 2017
ISBN 978-1604337112

Andrew Ogus

Cider Mill/Applesauce Press’s
new publication, the tenth in their
“Classic Edition” series, houses
Charles Santore’s exquisitely ren¬
dered watercolors in a volume
intended for “children attending

preschool or early elementary
school. . . the ‘to be read to’ chil¬
dren’s audience.” There are in¬
deed many pictures, but the ratio
of words to images disqualifies this
volume from being “a children’s
picture book.” While it’s true that
many contemporary young read¬
ers might be wise to wait at least
until preadolescence for their first
exposure to the Alice books, to
paraphrase Maurice Sendak one
should never edit down for chil¬
dren. For anyone familiar with the
original, the gaps in this (barely
acknowledged) abridgment by
Elizabeth Encarnacion are jarring.
Anyone unfamiliar with the origi¬
nal might wonder what all the fuss
is about; the music of the language
has been stilled, not simplified.

The tightly rendered illustra¬
tions fulfill the promise of the
“sketches” Charles Santore pub¬
lished in his Under Ground in 2015
(KL 96: 42). As Michael Hearn
points out in his introduction, it’s
pleasant to see Alice correctly
dressed, wearing a yellow dress
with a blue sash (KL 85:27). An
actual young lady posed for Alice,
and it shows. There are images of
rare beauty: Alice giggling at the
fate of the Duchess in a formal
garden, the splendid Lobster Qua¬
drille. There are brilliant imagi¬
native flashes, such as a dripping
mouse standing before the drip¬
ping shadows of a duck and an
owl; a hapless Hatter, abandoned
by his friends at the trial, standing

4 1

on a strawberry-colored carpet
decorated with hearts. Many of
the well-rendered animal jurors
are “left-handed.”

The human faces of lesser char¬
acters appear to be modeled on
real people. A scary Cheshire Cat
opposing the King and Queen
provides respite from the overall
sweetness. Santore picks up on
images often missed: Alice’s arm
thrusts a ladder toward the star¬
tled Bill; the gardener cards have
dripped paint on the ground and
each other; the decidedly cute,
very blond royal children amuse
themselves by imitating their par¬
ents’ soldiers. Gatefolds allow for
panoramic views as Alice falls verti¬
cally through the rabbit hole and
sits horizontally at one end of the
lengthy tea party table (though
one wonders why the Hatter looks
so green, and why the Hare is
wearing flowers instead of straw).

Images bleed or come close
to the trim with varied margins;
there are runarounds of differ¬
ent shapes here and there; a few
characters break through their
backgrounds; words sometimes
overprint a full bleed background.
The text-heavy pages, dark type,
oversize format, and lavish gate-
folds make the book awkward for
reading alone or aloud to a group.
Was it designed to serve the pic¬
tures rather than the text?

Over all, this is a straightfor¬
wardly pictured version of Won¬
derland, pleasant to look at rather
than to read. “The classic edition”
it is not.

- m -

Rare, Uncollected & Unpublished
Verse of Lewis Carroll
LCSNA, 2018
Compiled and annotated
by August A. Imholtz, Jr.

& Edward Wakeling

Edward Wakeling

This new book is, or will soon
be, in your hands as this year’s
membership premium. It con¬
tains about forty poems by Lewis
Carroll that have either never

been published before or have
been produced from an incorrect
transcription. The book will also
contain a large number of memo-
ria technica verses—again, many
previously unpublished—together
with a few poems questionably at¬
tributable to Carroll.

The idea for this book arose out
of a conversation between the two
compilers some years ago, during
which several different publication
projects were discussed. A number
of verses in manuscript had already
come to light (including acrostic
verses written into presentation
copies of Carroll’s books), none of
which had been included in an¬
thologies of his poetry. Both com¬
pilers were of the opinion that this
would be of general interest, and
also contribute to Carrollian schol¬
arship. When the idea was put to
the publication arm of the Society,
it was well received, and at that
time it was suggested that some of
the artistic talent among Society
members could be employed to
illustrate the verses. The response
from the artists and illustrators
approached—Jonathan Dixon,
Tania Ianovskaia, Oleg Lipchenko,
Adriana Peliano, Byron Sewell, and
Mahendra Singh—was enthusias¬
tic, and their formidable creative
talents are in evidence in the book,
which Andrew Ogus designed.

- m -

The Alice Books and the Contested
Ground of the Natural World
Laura White
Routledge, 2017
ISBN 978-1138630826

Hayley Rushing

Laura White’s writing in The Alice
Books and the Contested Ground of the
Natural World is refreshingly clear,
but it is not a “moseying” ease:
Instead, the diction has a to-the-
point limpidity often rare in aca¬
deme. Even the thesis of the book
is made pleasantly obvious:

It is not surprising that Lewis

Carroll’s two brilliant children’s

fantasies, Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland and Through the
Looking-Glass, obsessively joke
about the uneasy status of
human beings at the apex of
creation and the top of the food
chain, for both books were writ¬
ten within a period of rapidly
changing attitudes about human¬
kind’s relationship to the rest
of nature. . . . The aim of this
book is to examine Carroll and
the Alice books in relation to the
wide-reaching Victorian debates,
in part prompted by Darwinian
thought, about the proper rela¬
tionship between human beings
and the rest of nature.

White is well read in Carrollian
discourse and provides a hefty
bibliography in her footnotes, but
she makes clear what is germane
to her subject. She sees Carrollian
studies as a variety of disciplines,
and acknowledges the fields of
logic, linguistics, and philosophy
as relevant to the analysis of Car-
roll/Dodgson, but her chapter
titles reveal her main topics of in¬
terest: “Interpreting Carroll’s Sat¬
ires,” “Carroll and the Emerging
Sciences,” “Carroll and Darwinian
Satire,” “Animals and Anthropo¬
morphism in the Alice Books,”
“Eating,” and “Natural History in
the Alice Books.”

As is unfortunately becoming a
requisite in books about Carroll,
White addresses the all-too-com-
mon accusations of pedophilia
surrounding the public’s image of
Carroll, presenting well-evidenced
certainty about his innocence and
the very nature of innocence. We
get the sense that she is putting
the issue to rest so the work can
proceed, unencumbered by sordid
suspicion that is completely irrel¬
evant to the topics explored.

The first chapter begins with
the reasonable supposition that
Carroll didn’t expect all of his
jokes to be caught by the reader,
which lays a curious foundation
for White’s argument: Did you
never catch the satirical critique

of Darwin in the Alice books? It’s
okay—Carroll didn’t expect you
to. It’s a liberating justification for
any academic who’s ever explored
something unexpected, or some¬
thing that’s a bit of a stretch. That
isn’t to say that White’s assertion
is a stretch—indeed, her findings
are well-argued and convincing—
but to present the “it’s okay you
didn’t know” foundation at the
beginning of the first chapter in¬
spires a sense of suspicion for the
rest of the book, nonetheless.

The text is full of “huh” mo¬
ments (i.e., “I never thought of it
that way”), such as the suggestion
that “The Walrus and the Car¬
penter” reflects the ambiguous
morality of the fact that oysters
are still technically alive when we
eat them, and that, despite the
chess theme, no bishops appear in
Through the Looking-Glass because
Carroll disapproved of religious
matters appearing in nonserious
material. The real gem of the
book is chapter four, “Animals and
Anthropomorphism in the Alice
Books.” A vast variety of topics
about the Victorian relationship
with animals, and what literary
anthropomorphism says about
that relationship, is covered in this
chapter, including where chil¬
dren encounter animals, Darwin
and the food chain, Aesop, anti¬
vivisection activism, the Christian
doctrine of man’s sovereignty over
animals (but not, according to
Carroll, the right to cause pain),
the rise of vegetarianism, the first
animal rights legislation (usu¬
ally failed) and animal welfare
societies (and mocking thereof),
performing animals (such as danc¬
ing bears), zoos, taxidermy, pet
memorials, Carroll’s own “comic
cruelty,” Alice’s own lack of sympa¬
thy for the suffering/mistreatment
of animals and her keen awareness
of predator-prey relations, Car¬

roll’s own fondness for dogs, how
the curiously nonanthropomor-
phic puppy in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland reflects the order of
human dominion, and games of
pretend-hunting Carroll shared
with child-friends. White’s ulti¬
mate point about anthropomor¬
phism is to show what nonsense
does to reaffirm cultural norms.
She writes, “nonsensical anthro¬
pomorphism only reinforces that
divide [between humans and ani¬
mals] when nonsense yields—as
it does at the close of each of his
Alice books—to sense.”

This critical history, albeit ex¬
pensive ($150 list), is worthy of
any Carrollian’s bookshelf because
it is unlike anything you’d pres¬
ently find on such a shelf. While
I’ve heard brief references to
Alice’s relationship with the sci¬
ences at conferences in the past,
I’ve never encountered the top¬
ics explored at such length as in
White’s monograph.

EVERGREEN

I’d first like to share a statistic I re¬
cently came across that surprised
me, and certainly explains Michael
Everson’s passion! According to
Vistawide, there are about three
billion native speakers of the top
ten languages (Mandarin, Hindi,
Spanish, English, . . .), one billion
of the next twenty (Panjabi, Java¬
nese, Korean, . . .), and 3.6 billion
(47%) who natively speak one of
the other 6,900 languages! Nearly
half of the world’s population
speak a language that is not even
in the top thirty!

Since our last issue, five titles
have been released by Michael’s
inexhaustible Evertype press:

Las Aventuras de Alisia en el Paiz de
las Maraviyas, Wonderland trans¬
lated into Ladino by Avner Perez
(KL 93:51). Ladino, also known
as Judaeo-Spanish, is a language
primarily spoken among Sep¬
hardic Jews. Both a first edition in

Hebrew characters (

, ISBN 978-1-

78201-178-1) and a second edition
in roman characters (ISBN 978-1-
78201-179-8) are now available.

The Westminster Alice. H. H. Munro
(Saki)’s 1908 political parody
based on the Alice dyad, with il¬
lustrations by Francis Carruthers
Gould (1908), a foreword by John
Alfred Spender (1927), and an
afterword by Hugh Cahill (2010)
is now in a second edition, which
contains a previously uncollected
chapter, “Alice Wants to Know,”
originally published in a limited
edition of 45 copies by the Sangrail
Press (ISBN 978-1-78201-147-7).

N Hana Kupanaha a leka ma ka
ina Kamaha o, R. Keao NeSmith’s
translation of Wonderland into Ha¬
waiian. This second edition incor¬
porates a number of corrections
and other changes, as well as an
article taken from the Hawaiian-
language newspaper Ke Alaula, 1
December 1870, which contains
a white-rabbit story that may have
been influenced by Alice (ISBN
978-1-78201-166-8).

Ma Loko o keAniani K a me ka Mea
i Loa a i leka ma Laila , R. Keao
NeSmith’s translation of Through
the Looking-Glass into Hawaiian.
This second edition incorporates
some corrections (ISBN 978-1-
78201-170-5).

(lis neh

S yerstanda i majaralan ), Wonder¬
land translated into Bashkir by
Giizal Sitdykova. The Bashkir lan¬
guage, a state language of the Re¬
public of Bashkortostan (Russian
Federation), belongs to the Turkic
branch of the Altaic languages,
and is spoken by 1.2 million people
(ISBN 978-1-78201-201-6).

ART & ILLUSTRATION

David Elliot’s lavishly illustrated
Snark: Being a True History of the
Expedition That Discovered the
Snark and theJabberwock ... And
Its Tragic Aftermath, published
by Otago University Press, has
taken not one, but two of New
Zealand’s most prominent book
awards for children and young
adults. Enthusiastically reviewed
both on our blog and in the Knight
Letter (KL 98:43), for which it also
provided the cover illustration, the
book won both the Margaret Mahy
Book of the Year Award and the
Russell Clark Award for Illustration
for 2017.

Digital photomontagist Maggie
Taylor’s Looking-Glass companion
to her superb Wonderland, subject
of Andrew Sellon’s glowing review
{KL 81:43), will be available in
March of 2018. The online photo¬
eye Gallery is showing six of her
new images for sale, and the Cath¬
erine Couturier Gallery in Hous¬
ton has many others and will be
hosting an exhibition from April 7
- May 12 of her Looking-Glass work.
One hundred limited editions
will be printed, each including an
8x8 print of the cover image. To
reserve one ($800), email gallery®
catherinecouturier.com or call
(713) 524-5070. A trade edition
will be published by The Univer¬
sity Press of Florida.

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ftrtt/fftfx

ARTICLES & ACADEMIA

The May/June 2017 issue of The
Horn Book Magazine had an article
called “Laughter and Resistance:
Humor as a Weapon in the Age of
Trump” by Philip Nel. A page of
this article was devoted to Lewis
Carroll comparisons.

The New York Times published an
obituary of Morton Cohen online
on July 4, a date that would please
him (being the 155th anniversary
of the boat trip up the Isis), writ¬
ten by Richard Sandomir, husband
of our own Patt Griffin. The article

appeared in the print edition the
next day.

Mark Richards, Amirouche Mok-
tefi, and Robin Wilson edited a
special issue of The Carrollian (LCS
[UK], Issue 30) for papers given at
the Lewis Carroll: Man of Science
conference held at the London
School of Economics and Political
Science in August of 2011. Five
papers are included by Wilson,
Fran Abeles, Eugene Seneta, Ed¬
ward Wakeling, and Ivor Grattan-
Guiness.

BOOKS

Abby in Wonderland by Sarah Mly-
nowski, is part of her Whatever After
series for the elementary school
crowd (Scholastic Press, 978-
0545746649).

AW: A Keepsake Journal & Ten Il¬
lustrated Quote Cards is very nicely
produced, with sharp, stylized
illustrations, but was the victim of

All Far-Flung items
and their links, implicit 1
or explicit, are from
www.lewiscarroll.org/ «
blog and can be accessed
jjb by using its search box.

its compiler’s (and editor’s!) jaw-
y ^dropping laziness. Apparently he
or she typed “Lewis Carroll
quotes” into a search en¬
gine, and did no checking
up on the results. Seven of
the quotes are relatively ac¬
curate (or at least close para¬
phrases or extracts), but three
have nothing at all to do with Car-
roll: both “I’m not strange, weird,
off, nor crazy, my reality is just dif¬
ferent than yours” and “How long
is forever? Sometimes, just one
second” have no known source
or association, whilst “‘Have I
gone mad?’ ‘I’m afraid so. You’re
entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell
you a secret. All the best people
are.’” is, sigh, from the 2010 Tim
Burton movie (Rockpoint, 978-
1631061202).

Alice Through the Looking Glass: A
Matter of Time by Carla Jablonski
is a choose-your-own-adventure
novel for youngsters based on the
miserable 2016 film (Disney Press,
978-1484729601).

Classics Reimagined: AW, illustrated
by Andrea D’Aquino and ardently
reviewed by Andrew Ogus in KL
95:57, is now in paperback in a
smaller format (Rockport, 978-
1631593697).

The second volume of Byron
Sewell’s The Lish Chronicles, a mys¬
tery tale of a Carroll collector and
a very rare Spanish translation, has
been published by Boojum Run
Press. They are: Skinny Alice (ISBN
978-1974038596) and Comic Alice
(978-1975850289). The trilogy will
be given a full review in the KL
when the third volume becomes
available.

Hello Kitty Presents the Storybook
Collection: AW by Sanrio is for
preschoolers and kindergarten¬
ers (Abrams Appleseed, 978-
1419720321).

Knickerbocker Classics: AW and Other
Tales is a nicely boxed, generally
well printed (save for the nth-
generation, too dark Tenniels)
omnium-gatherum of Carroll’s

novels, verse, puzzles, acrostics,
prologues to plays, stories, and
miscellaneous publications. There
are some unusual and quirky se¬
lections, setting it apart from the
usual “Collected Works” volumes.

It is introduced by Lori M. Camp¬
bell, PhD, an author and lecturer
at the University of Pittsburgh,
who is generally informative, but
goes on at unconscionable length
about the nature of Carroll’s feel¬
ings for his female child friends
(RacePoint, 978-1631060687).

Knickerbocker Classics: AW/LG is a
“flexibound” book featuring an
engaging, modern introduction by
Jennifer Garlen, an independent
scholar (PhD, Auburn University)
and writer based in Huntsville,
Alabama; the Tenniel illustrations;
and a timeline and a bibliogra¬
phy at the back (RacePoint, 978-
1631061707).

French illustrator Benjamin La-
combe, whose Wonderland {Alice au
pays des merveilles) was enthusiasti¬
cally reviewed by Adriana Peliano
(KL 97:55), has completed the
companion Looking-Glass {Alice
de Vautre cote du miroir) , both pub¬
lished by Soleil Productions. You
can buy it individually or boxed
with his Wonderland. There is also
a blank notebook with his Alice on
the cover. ISBNs: 978-2302048478

- Wonderland , 978-2302055971

- Looking-Glass, , 978-2302059214

- combined and boxed, 978-
2302058378 - notebook {carnet).

The Macmillan Collector’s Library
AW/LG is a small hardcover fea¬
turing colored (by whom is not
revealed) Tenniel illustrations and
an introduction by Anna South.

Ms. South, an Oxford graduate
and freelance writer, has written
more than a dozen introductions
or afterwords for the Collector’s
Library. Her intro here is well-re-
searched and insightful, although
it ends with the rather disingenu¬
ous statement, “_it is now difficult

to imagine the Alice books with any

other pictures” (Macmillan, 978-1-
9096-2158-9).

Much of a Muchness: A Survey of
the American Editions of the Alice
Books Published from 1866 to 1960
by Byron Sewell is a reprinting of
Byron’s monumental study (in
collaboration with Hilda Bohem),
first published in 1992 in a hard¬
cover edition of 17 copies, with an
introduction by Sandor G. Burst-
ein. This is a facsimile edition of
sorts, done in collaboration with
Byron’s brother Nathan. There
has been no updating, but the
addition of 200+ full-color scans
of book covers and jackets (from
the Tannenbaum Collection), and
two illustrations (the color cover
and the title page) make it even
more attractive (WordType, 978-
1976336454). Available through
CreateSpace (Amazon).

Wonderland Omnibus collects the
complete Grimm Fairy Tales Won¬
derland series {Return to..., Beyond
..., Escape from ..., and Tales from
...), if violent R-rated comics fea¬
turing buxom characters are to
your taste. By Raven Gregory, Joe
Brusha, and Ralph Tedesco (Zene-
scope, ISBN 978-1939683632).

_ m _

EVENTS, EXHIBITS, & PLACES

Wondering where to stay in Japan?
The Alice in Wonderland Room at
Tokyo Disneyland Hotel, of course.
“The room interior, including the
beds and other furniture, is de¬
signed with motifs of the Queen
of Hearts, the Card Soldiers, the
Cheshire Cat and other images
from the [1951] Disney film.”

The Castle of St-Maurice in St-
Maurice, Switzerland, had an ex¬
hibition of Alice illustrations from
April 7 to November 12, 2017.
Some are from published books,
but there was also a “preamble”
of original art from students of
the Ecole Professionnelle des Arts
Contemporains (EPAC), the Swiss
private school of comic and game

art. The poster features Benjamin
Lacombe’s artwork.

The world-renowned Mathemati¬
cal Sciences Research Institute
(MSRI) in Berkeley, California,
hosted a “Celebration of Mind”
event on October 15. These CoM
events, offshoots of the Gath-
ering4Gardner, occur globally in
the realm of Martin Gardner’s
birthday (October 21), and are
generally centered around math,
magic, puzzles, and games. This
particular one had an Alice theme,
with t-shirts, signage, and talks by
Mark Burstein (“What Is It about
Alice?”) and Stuart Moskowitz of
Humboldt State (“64 = 65? Lewis
Carroll’s Puzzles and Math”). The
event ended with shows of magic
by Martin’s son Jim Gardner and
master magician Mark Mitton.

“Beyond the Mirror” at the Calo-
uste Gulbenkian Museum in
Lisbon (now through February
5, 2018), “a title that deliberately
alludes to the world of Alice Lid¬
dell, the heroine created by Lewis
Carroll (1832-1898), is a thematic
exhibition, which takes the mirror
as its main focus. The intention is
to show the polysemic presence of
this object in the iconography of
European art, particularly within
painting, but also in sculpture,
books, photography, and film.”

- M -

INTERNET 6^ TECHNOLOGY

Disney’s Alice in one shot? Jason
Shulman captures the entire dura¬
tion of a movie in a single image
with his series Photographs of Films,
one of which is the 1951 Disney
film. “Pointing his camera at a
screen and making an ultra-long
exposure of the film as it plays
through, each scene from a movie
is overlaid on top on another until
they dissolve into an impressionis¬
tic blur—but with faint distinguish¬
ing features remaining. ‘There
are roughly 130,000 frames in a
90-minute film, and every frame
of each film is recorded in these

photographs,’ Shulman says.” New
large-scale versions of the works
were part of the Photo London
festival in May, and were shown at
Cob Gallery, London, in June.

Leaving aside the irony of a You¬
Tube channel devoted to yoga and
meditation, episodes of British
personality Jaime Amor’s popular
Cosmic Kids Yoga take on various
themes ( Star Wars, Frozen, The Very
Hungry Caterpillar , etc.) to encour¬
age children to practice spiritual
disciplines. It was inevitable that
one based on Alice in Wonderland
was made.

MOVIES & TELEVISION

We recently discovered a children’s
animated version on DVD that did
not make David Schaefer’s otherwise
definitive “Filmography” article in
The Annotated Alice: 150 th Anniversary
Deluxe Edition. The Festival of Family
Classics: The Princess Collection DVD
(Sony Wonder, 2006) includes AW
among its four fairy tales. The fairly
primitive cartoons were originally
made by Mushi Studios (Rankin/
Bass) in 1972.

We regret to note the passing of
Tom Petty (1950-2017), whose
1985 music video “Don’t Come
Around Here No More” featured
a Wonderland theme, with Tom as
the Hatter.

- M -

MUSIC

John Langdon’s Alice and the Grace¬
ful White Rabbit (reviewed here on
p. 37) was originally supposed to
become an e-book/app. “[His]
former student and good friend
Chris McNulty, along with a few
friends and several members of his
musical family, made terrific and

quite professional recordings of
the nonsense verses that are part
of the text.” You can access those
recordings on soundcloud.com/
user-502430710/sets/alice.

-X-

PERFORMING ARTS

Joanna Lumley ( AbFab ) and comic
actor Stephen Mangan read “The
Walrus and the Carpenter” on¬
stage at the National Theatre in
London on November 10 at the
launch of Allie Esiri’s anthology A
Poem for Every Day of the Year (Pan
Macmillan, 2017).

-X-

THINGS

The Mathematical Institute of the
University of Oxford has produced
a set of six posters called “C. L.
Dodgson, Oxford Mathemati¬
cian,” which are available for free
download and, presumably, print¬
ing. They are designed for “AO”
paper (33.1 x 46.8 inches; 118.9 x
84.1 cm) at full size, but of course
you can print them at any size you
want. The posters were conceived
by Robin Wilson, with the assis¬
tance of Raymond Flood, Dyrol
Lumbard, and Edward Wakeling.

The highly desirable Pirelli cal¬
endar for 2018 is Wonderland-
inspired, styled by British Vogue
Editor-in-Chief Edward Ennin-
ful, the first black man to helm
a mainstream women’s fashion
magazine, and shot by Tim Walker
with an all-black celebrity cast.

Its stars include Lupita Nyong’o,
Naomi Campbell, Whoopi Gold¬
berg, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and
Ru Paul, who portrays the Queen
of Hearts. These calendars are
boxed and sent to Pirelli dealers
and friends, and command prices
in the thousands of dollars for a
single copy (one does hope they
will go down in value after the year
is ended).

Who needs words? Chicago artist
Nicholas Rougeux’s Between the
Words project is “an exploration
of visual rhythm of punctuation
in well-known literary works. All
letters, numbers, spaces, and line
breaks were removed from entire
texts of classic stories like Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, Moby
Dick, and Pride and Prejudice —leav¬
ing only the punctuation in one
continuous line of symbols in the
order they appear in texts, [which]
was arranged in a spiral, starting at
the top center, with markings for
each chapter and a classic illustra¬
tion at the center.” Posters come
in various sizes (from 4 x 6 to 40
x 60 inches) and papers, and can
be ordered through Zazzle. It is
certainly a unique way of looking
at texts. For example, he would
render this very paragraph (up to
the beginning of this sentence to
avoid an infinite loop; the period
at the end of this sentence is an
actual one) in a nonspiral manner
as: []„.”(xx)„.

Madame Alexander has outdone
herself, producing the most ano¬
dyne Jabberwock (which she refers
to as a “Jabberwocky”) ever seen,
a golden, baby-faced cherub with
wings.

The “Woot! Deals and Shenani¬
gans” e-commerce site hath many
an Alice t-shirt, printed to order.
Hie thyself to shirt.woot.com and
put “Alice” in the “Search all de¬
signs” box.

In r/crappydesign, the subreddit
devoted to horrifying style and
engineering choices, it was noted
that “in the Disney Villains deck of
playing cards, the Queen of Hearts
is the three of Clubs.” Just, why?

4 6

Marlys in Trailerland, Lynda Barry, 1998

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